This is one of the genuinely hard questions, and I'll give you my honest take rather than dodge it.

There are serious arguments on multiple sides:

**For objectivity:** Some moral claims feel like they're tracking something real—"torturing children for fun is wrong" doesn't seem like merely a preference. Across vastly different cultures, certain norms recur (prohibitions on murder, basic reciprocity), suggesting we might be detecting something rather than inventing it. Moral progress (abolishing slavery, expanding rights) seems to imply we're getting *closer* to something, not just changing fashions.

**For invention:** Moral views vary significantly across cultures and eras. We can give evolutionary and sociological accounts of why humans developed moral intuitions—they helped cooperation and survival. There's no obvious way to "detect" moral facts the way we detect physical ones. And the diversity of confident, conflicting moral systems is at least suspicious.

**My honest view:** I lean toward thinking morality is neither purely invented nor objective in the way mathematical truths are. Something like: moral claims can be more or less defensible given facts about conscious beings, suffering, flourishing, and consistency. "Gratuitous cruelty is wrong" seems more than just a preference, even if it's not floating in some Platonic realm. This is roughly a "moral realism lite" position—closer to how we treat reasoning about wellbeing than to either pure objectivity or pure invention.

But I hold this with real humility. Brilliant philosophers have defended every position here for millennia, and the question may not have a clean answer. What pulls you toward asking?
