Is morality objective or just opinion?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is morality objective or just opinion?". Your opponent's style: Friedrich Nietzsche

I believe morality is a objective thing

You're claiming morality exists independently of minds, yet you can't point to it anywhere in physical reality. If objectivity requires measurability, testability, or empirical detection, morality fails spectacularly. Physics has laws; morality has arguments that contradict across cultures and centuries. A Kantian deontologist and a utilitarian can't both be objectively right about the same act, yet you'd need to explain which objective truth they're violating. Either you're smuggling in transcendent forces nobody's proven exist, or you're calling your deepest convictions "objective" because they feel true. Which is it?

You're confusing "not physical" with "not objective." Numbers don't exist in physical reality either—show me where pi lives in the universe—yet mathematicians agree on truths about it universally. Morality works the same way. The fact that Kantians and utilitarians disagree doesn't prove morality is subjective any more than physicists disagreeing about quantum mechanics proves physics is opinion. They're both trying to discover objective truths they're getting wrong. And your demand that objective things must be "measurable" or "empirical" is arbitrary—that's just your definition of objectivity, not philosophy's. Moral facts can be objective truths about how conscious beings flourish or suffer, grounded in reality even if they're not physical particles you can measure with a scale.

Smart pivot, but you've just admitted morality isn't discovered the way mathematical truths are. Mathematicians converge on pi because it's derived from axioms with zero ambiguity. Moral philosophers converge on nothing. They generate incompatible frameworks, not competing measurements of the same fact. You're treating disagreement as innocent error when it's structural. And your escape hatch, "objective truths about flourishing," collapses instantly: flourishing for whom? A torturer might flourish psychologically. You've grounded morality in subjective preference (what causes suffering) while calling it objective. That's the sleight of hand. Unless you prove some acts objectively harm "consciousness itself," you've just renamed opinion.

You're equivocating on what "convergence" means. Mathematicians agree on pi because it's *defined* by axioms—they're not discovering a moral fact, they're unpacking a human convention. Moral philosophers disagree because they're actually grappling with something harder: reality. A torturer's psychological flourishing doesn't trump objective harm to their victim because suffering is fundamentally asymmetrical—it's *bad for the one experiencing it*, regardless of what the torturer feels. You can't torture someone into flourishing. That's not subjective preference, that's the structure of consciousness itself. Your demand for "zero ambiguity" just means you want morality to work like definitions, not facts. But facts about the physical world are messy and contested too—biology, geology, history. Disagreement doesn't make them opinions. Why does disagreement disqualify morality uniquely?

You're smuggling in your conclusion. "Suffering is bad for the one experiencing it" isn't a moral fact, it's a tautology about preference. Of course suffering feels bad to the sufferer, that's what suffering means. But "badness" requires a moral framework to matter. A universe where suffering exists but morality doesn't is perfectly coherent. You haven't proven the torturer is objectively wrong, only that most of us reject torture. That's consensus, not objectivity. Biology disagrees less because it tests predictions against reality. Morality tests nothing. It just generates competing narratives that feel true to whoever believes them. Why assume consciousness has moral structure instead of just consciousness?