In Defence of Relativism

The provided text is an academic essay titled, "Disagreement Without Referees: Ontological Incommensurability and the Limits of Moral Adjudication," authored by independent scholar Bry Willis. The central thesis challenges the common belief that persistent moral and political disagreements are remediable failures of communication or reasoning, arguing instead that they often stem from ontological incommensurability, meaning the conflicting parties operate with fundamentally incompatible background commitments about what is real and what grounds normativity. Willis distinguishes between correctable "disagreements of opinion" and irresolvable "disagreements of ontology," suggesting that conflating the two leads to frustration and misdiagnosis. The paper is diagnostic rather than prescriptive, aiming to clarify why certain conflicts resist resolution by rejecting the expectation of neutral adjudication or "referees" and embracing the reality of "commitment without guarantees" in a pluralistic moral landscape. Willis addresses and accepts the common philosophical charges of relativism and subjectivism, but rejects the typical inference that these positions entail quietism or the collapse of all moral meaning.📝Essay: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17932544