Dear Socrates

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Having returned from the turn of the Fourth Century B.C. to the turn of the Twenty-First A.D., Socrates has eagerly signed on as a Philosophy Now columnist so that he may continue to carry out his divinely-inspired dialogic mission.

Dear Socrates,

I have a query about objectivism versus relativism. I’m studying philosophy, and my lecturer says that I cannot take a relativistic standpoint in my arguments because relativism is a lazy philosophical paradigm to use. By this it is meant that if everything was relative, there would be no need for moral debate, etc. But surely objectivism is an imperialistic paradigm to superimpose upon a situation, because its foundations are Judeo-Christian. And isn’t ethics evolutionary? If so, how could there justifiably be objective moral grounds? Our very sense of morality is in flux.

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