I've seen lots of people on the Internet criticize others for making moral judgments about past figures, and they often criticize them in the name of "presentism". The idea seems to be that historians must make sure to keep all moral judgments out of their history, because their moral perspective is inevitably contaminated by present-day norms.

When I googled the term and went to Wikipedia, it recommended the 1970 book Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought by David Hackett Fischer. But when I looked up its discussion of "presentism", it has nothing to do with moral judgments. Instead, it's about historians who tend to ignore historical events that are irrelevant to present-day events, selecting events that are still relevant to focus on. This is supposed to be a bad idea because if you really want to understand the present, you'll examine a more representative sample of past events, and get "knowledge useful in the establishment of present trends and future tendencies".

But not only does "presentism" seem to have nothing do with moral judgments, Fischer seems to say the exact opposite about moral judgments:

Most reasonable men would agree that all historians, without exception, must and should make value judgments in their work.

Fischer's totally okay with moral judgments, as long as they are "functional, or neutral, to empirical inquiry". Historians should make their values explicit, and then "design a research problem in which [their] values allow an open end". That's certainly not what the Internet says!

Of course, that's just Fischer. So I went to Google Scholar, and searched for "presentism history". On the whole, the results have nothing to do with moral judgments, and everything to do with what Fischer discussed: selecting which historical events to examine with an eye to present-day relevance.

So is this whole Internet usage of "presentism" a big mistake, or (if not) can someone point me to an actual scholarly discussion of "presentism" and moral judgments? Thanks!