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Dear Socrates
Dear Socrates
Having traveled from the turn of the Fourth Century B.C. to the turn of the Twenty-First Century 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,
In a previous dialogue (in Issue 65) you mentioned that there are no evil opossums because there are no virtuous opossums. My question is this: Assuming that good and evil are really just abstract human notions applied to the behavior of other humans, could not these notions just as arbitrarily be applied to opossums? Something is good only if a human designates it as such (and other humans typically agree), so an opossum could be good or bad just as a human can if we agreed to designate it as such, right? If you disagree, please respond and explain to me another way of looking at right and wrong.
Josh McIntyre
Alto, Michigan, U.S.A.
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