Disagreement Without Referees: Ontological Incommensurability and the Limits of Moral Adjudication

Persistent moral and political disagreements are often treated as failures of reasoning, evidence, or communication, with the expectation that sufficient deliberation should yield convergence. This paper argues that many such disagreements are not epistemic in character but ontological: they arise between incompatible background frameworks that determine what counts as real, meaningful, or normatively binding in the first place. Where such frameworks do not overlap, disagreement cannot be resolved by appeal to shared standards of rational adjudication because no such standards are jointly recognised. Drawing on insights from work on incommensurability, language-games, and tradition-bound rationality, the paper distinguishes disagreements of opinion from disagreements of ontology and examines how the latter are routinely misdiagnosed within Enlightenment-inherited moral discourse. It argues that familiar accusations of “relativism” or “subjectivism” function less as substantive objections than as mechanisms of boundary maintenance within dominant normative frames. The paper also rejects the claim that the absence of stance-independent moral facts entails arbitrariness or moral paralysis. Evaluation persists under post-foundational conditions, but it does so without neutral referees, relocating moral conflict to political forms of persuasion, coalition-building, institutional contestation, and power. The paper is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. It does not propose a new normative framework or method of moral adjudication, but aims to clarify why certain disagreements persist despite sustained argument and why attempts at mediation or rational convergence often misfire under conditions of ontological incommensurability.