In Ethics After Babel* Jeffrey Stout has advanced and defended two interrelated theses: first, that Davidsonian insights effectively subdue many forms of ethical relativism, second, that if relativism, skepticism, and nihilism are effectively dissolved by semantic holism, then the possibility, announced by communitarians such as Bellah and Maclntyre, that individualism might lack any resources to sustain rational moral discourse is, at best, overstated, and at worst, unintelligible. In this essay I shall argue that although Stout's analyses of conceptual and alethic relativism are largely correct, they do not support his conviction that liberal modernity is a sociological fiction. On the contrary, it is only because relativism has been transcended in the work of such philosophers as Davidson, Gadamer, Rorty, and Stout himself, that one can see why intractable moral and political dispute is so much a part of contemporary social life. Stout's allusion to Babel is largely deflationary: he believes that the mere facts of fundamental moral disagreement and conceptual diversity do not automatically cement the cases of moral skeptics, nihilists, or relativists. He invites us to view the debate between ethical universalists and their adversaries as bedeviled by a misleading either/or. Universalistic moral epistemologists, such as Gewirth and Donagan, as well as relativists such as Wong and Harman, confront us with the option of construing morality either as accessible to pure practical reason as such, or as irreducibly particularized and unique. There is reason to suspect, Stout argues, that this taken-for-granted dichotomy is theoretically and practically unsupportable. ' Stout's via media between universalism and particularism draws heavily upon the work of Donald Davidson, who, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation?established two important semantic truths. First, the idea of a conceptual framework or grid which either organizes or conforms to some preconceptual content is vacuous: that content is either specifiable and determinate, in which case it is not preconceptual, or it is not specifiable or determinate, and thus one is given no good reason to believe in it. Here Davidson simply updates and gives an analytic twist to Hegel's dismissal of Kant's ding-an-sich as both unintelligible and superfluous. Second, and more importantly, Davidson reveals the