I’ve just published a new preprint on Zenodo: Disagreement Without Referees: Ontological Incommensurability and the Limits of Moral Adjudication 📄 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17932544

I welcome reviews, comments, and dissents.

This paper grows out of a frustration that will be familiar to anyone who spends time in moral or political argument: the sense that we keep talking past one another, mistaking deep incompatibilities for mere differences of opinion – and then moralising the failure to converge. Mostly, I’m tired of having to explain why my position isn’t subjectivist, relativist, quietist, nihilist, or whatever –ist flavour du jour. As with John Lennon, I complain about the –isms.

The core claim is simple but unfashionable: many persistent disagreements are not epistemic at all. They are ontological. They do not arise within a shared background of assumptions about what exists, what counts as a reason, or what can ground normativity. They arise between incompatible background frameworks. When we treat such conflicts as if they were resolvable by better arguments, clearer communication, or more empathy, we misdiagnose the problem – and often make it worse.

The paper draws a sharp distinction between:

• Disagreements of opinion, which presuppose a shared world and are, in principle, corrigible; and
• Ontological disagreements, where what is contested is not the right answer, but what it would even mean for an answer to be right.

From there, I examine why charges like ‘relativism’, ‘subjectivism’, or ‘anything goes’ retain such rhetorical force despite their weak logical footing. The argument is not that these labels are false descriptions so much as that they function as boundary-maintenance devices within Enlightenment-inherited moral frames. They stabilise a sense of moral order by excluding positions that deny neutral adjudication.

I also take up the familiar worry that abandoning objective moral grounding leads to arbitrariness or nihilism. The paper rejects this caricature. Evaluation does not disappear when foundations are withdrawn; it relocates. What follows is not moral collapse but moral life without referees, where disagreement is managed through persuasion, coalition-building, institutional design, and power, rather than appeals to metaphysical authority.

Importantly, the paper is diagnostic, not prescriptive. It does not offer a new moral framework, a reconciliatory theory, or a solution to moral conflict. It argues instead for a clearer understanding of why some disagreements resist resolution, and for a more honest account of what remains once the fantasy of neutral adjudication is relinquished.

If nothing else, the hope is that recognising ontological incommensurability can temper the moral theatre that so often accompanies disagreement – replacing accusations of irrationality or bad faith with a clearer sense of what is, and is not, at stake.

This essay is also available on PhilPapers. For now, the full preprint is available on Zenodo at the link above.

As ever, comments are welcome – provided we’re clear about which world we think we’re standing in.