Are right and wrong real and fixed, or made up by societies?

Real and fixed. If there is no God, "wrong" is just opinion — and no one truly lives as if murder is opinion. The conscience recognizes the great wrongs; revelation supplies the rest.

Atheist philosophers genuinely split. Moral realists such as Erik Wielenberg hold that some moral truths — cruelty is wrong — are real and fixed and need no God; error theorists following J. L. Mackie say morality is a human invention, though a necessary one. Both camps agree societies should keep and enforce morality either way.

Agnosticism itself takes no side; it is a position about knowing God, not about ethics. Individual agnostics split — some are moral realists, while many adopt humanist or utilitarian accounts in which morality is a human construction answering real human needs.

Real and fixed: right and wrong are grounded in God's own character and law, not in any human vote. Paul writes that the law's demands are 'written on the hearts' even of those without Scripture (Romans 2:14–15) — the seed of the natural-law tradition developed by Aquinas and defended in plain terms by C.S. Lewis.

Real and fixed, grounded in God's character and commands — Abraham can even appeal to that standard: 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?' Later thinkers debated whether the commandments have reasons we can discover (Maimonides) or rest on command alone, but not whether right and wrong are real.

Real and built into reality: wholesome and unwholesome actions carry consequences by the natural law of karma, not by divine command or social convention. What societies call right can be mistaken; the moral order itself is not made up.

Real: dharma is grounded in the cosmic order (rita), and karma responds to it impersonally, like a law of nature. But its demands are context-sensitive — what is right varies with one's role, stage of life, and era — so Hindu ethics is objective without being one-size-fits-all.

Real and fixed: right and wrong are grounded in the divine order (hukam) that runs through creation, not in social convention. How that order is applied — the community's codes of conduct — has been worked out and revised over time.

Secularism as such does not settle whether morality is fixed or made. In practice it anchors public right and wrong in constitutional rights and human dignity, and lets citizens ground those norms in God, reason, or tradition as they judge best — Rawls called this an overlapping consensus.

Humanists agree morality is not arbitrary, but split on its status: some hold moral truths are objectively real without God (Wielenberg); others treat ethics as a human project built to answer shared needs and refined over millennia (Kitcher, Kurtz).

Liberals split. Locke grounded rights in God's natural law; Kantians ground right and wrong in reason itself; utilitarians in human welfare; Rawls declined to decide, building justice on an 'overlapping consensus' that citizens of many faiths can each endorse from their own grounds.

On its core matter, feminism speaks as if right and wrong are real: the equal dignity of women is asserted as binding on every society, not as one local custom among others — that is the premise of CEDAW. Many feminist theorists hold that gender roles are social constructions; the moral claim of equality is not treated as one.

Nationalism takes no position; its followers draw morality from their religions and philosophies. Its own distinctive claim is narrower: that special duties to one's compatriots are morally real, a claim defended philosophically by Miller and Tamir.