The conversation began with the unmistakable sound of a false dichotomy being placed confidently on the table.
Mr Blottisham, arms folded in the posture of decisive classification, declared:
“Morality must be one of two things. Either it’s objective—true regardless of what anyone thinks—or it’s subjective—just opinion. That’s the whole issue, surely.”
Professor Quillibrace regarded him with the composed stillness of someone who has seen this fork in the road lead repeatedly into a hedge.
“Ah,” he said. “The ancient two-box solution. Always so certain there are only two boxes.”
Miss Elowen Stray, who had been watching a line of ants negotiate a crumb with considerable normative coordination, glanced up.
“You’ve already decided,” she said, “that morality is the kind of thing that can fit into a box at all.”
Blottisham frowned. “Well, it has to be something. Either it’s out there—objective—or it’s in here—subjective.”
He tapped his temple, then gestured vaguely at the horizon, as though distributing ontology across available space.
Quillibrace nodded slightly.
“Let us begin with the surface form,” he said. “The question ‘Is morality objective or subjective?’ presupposes that morality is a single, homogeneous domain—one thing—which must be assigned a global ontological status.”
Stray added, softly: “As if all moral phenomena were instances of the same kind of object.”
Blottisham shrugged. “Aren’t they?”
Quillibrace’s expression suggested that the universe had once again declined to cooperate with administrative simplicity.
“No,” he said. “They are not.”
A pause followed, in which the ants continued their work without appealing to meta-ethics.
“What you have done,” Quillibrace continued, “is compress a distributed field of normative activity into a single abstract object, and then demand that it declare its allegiance—objective or subjective.”
Stray traced a small arc in the dust.
“You’ve flattened different kinds of norm into one plane,” she said. “And now you’re asking that plane to choose a side.”
Blottisham looked mildly defensive. “But we do ask whether moral claims are true or just opinion.”
“Yes,” Quillibrace replied. “Because we have already collapsed distinct strata of normative realisation into a single evaluative space.”
Blottisham blinked. “Strata?”
Quillibrace continued, with the tone of someone carefully unpacking a conceptual compression.
“Consider,” he said, “that what you call ‘morality’ is realised across multiple levels: real-time interpersonal coordination, institutional stabilisation, cultural semiotic systems, and individual construal.”
Stray nodded. “Different ways of making normativity hold.”
“Precisely,” said Quillibrace. “And each of these involves different forms of constraint, stability, and variation. None of them maps cleanly onto ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ as global properties.”
Blottisham considered this, with visible reluctance.
“So you’re saying morality is… a mix of both?”
Quillibrace winced, very slightly.
“I am saying,” he replied, “that the binary does not apply.”
Stray added: “It’s not that morality sits somewhere between objectivity and subjectivity. It’s that those categories are misaligned with the phenomena.”
Blottisham exhaled. “But the distinction feels important. If morality is objective, then people can be wrong. If it’s subjective, then it’s just preference.”
Quillibrace inclined his head.
“Yes,” he said. “The binary persists because it promises to resolve disagreement. But it does so by misdescribing what disagreement is.”
Stray looked up. “Disagreement doesn’t always occur within a single shared domain,” she said. “It can occur across different strata of norm formation.”
Blottisham frowned. “Meaning?”
“Meaning,” Quillibrace said, “that what appears as a disagreement about ‘truth’ may in fact be a misalignment of systems—interactional, institutional, cultural—each with its own stabilisations.”
He paused.
“The binary assumes a single plane of evaluation. But morality is not flat.”
Blottisham looked out across the common, as if hoping for a morally instructive landscape.
“So there’s no answer to whether morality is objective or subjective?”
“There is no target for the question,” Quillibrace replied. “Once you remove the totalisation, there is no single entity called ‘morality’ that can be globally classified.”
Stray added, quietly: “What disappears is the demand for a final label.”
A breeze moved through the grass, rearranging nothing in particular.
Blottisham nodded slowly.
“So morality isn’t a thing that is objective or subjective,” he said. “It’s something that’s realised differently across systems.”
Quillibrace allowed the smallest hint of approval.
“Better,” he said.
But what we call morality is not one thing.
It is a field of normative realisations—stabilised in different ways, across different systems, under different constraints.
The binary does not resolve it.
It obscures the structure through which it is continuously brought into being.
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