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Plasmon comments on Rational subjects and rational practitioners - Less Wrong
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Are you sure "distance from objective knowledge" is the best x-axis to make this observation? "The closer you get to humans, the worse the science gets" is a fairly common quote, supposedly (?) from W. Elsasser. That fields more directly involved with humans are less rational is not surprising : practitioners of such fields see the direct relevance to people's lives as a good thing and gain status from it. Attempts to make these fields more rational (carefully-defined terminology, good statistics, computerised data-gathering and analysis,...) will appear to move such fields away from "directly relevant to people's lives" and towards "irrelevant academic ivory-tower practices".
"Far from objective knowledge", "subjective" and "close to humans" are different ways of saying pretty much the same thing - though I agree that "close to humans" may make some reasons for the problem a bit more obvious.
If this was more about politics than verifiability, I'd expect professional ethicists to disagree more over substantive ethics than metaethics, while the opposite seems to be the case. (There could of course be other factors gumming up the works - I can't think of any other good contrasts off the top of my head.)
Metaethics is the far younger field. It will need time to come to some widely shared and agreed-upon results.
The earliest I've managed to trace the phrase "The closer you get to humans, the worse the science gets" is a blog comment by David Marjanović July 13 2007. He claimed it was a proverb. Someone else in the thread then claimed "that's pretty much like a folk heuristic version of Walter M. Elsasser's 'Reflections on a Theory of Organisms: Holism in Biology'". I've been asking around for a better source, but it certainly doesn't seem to be something Elsasser said in those words. Marjanović is fond of it.
Edit: Found an earlier rendition, "Scienticity is everywhere lower where the subject is closer." - from Donald Black. "Dreams of pure sociology." Sociological Theory 18:3 November 2000.