Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Two aliens (identified in the caption as "Zorblaxians") are reading a book together. One reads aloud: "And then the other one starts talking about justice like it's an objective physical law." The other alien bursts out laughing hysterically. The caption explains: "The Zorblaxians believed the Socratic Dialogues were comedies."

The joke works by imagining an alien species that finds the philosophical foundations of Western thought to be hilarious rather than profound. In Plato's Socratic Dialogues, Socrates frequently argues that abstract concepts like justice, virtue, and beauty have objective, universal essences -- a position known as Platonic realism. The Zorblaxians apparently find this notion absurd, suggesting they hold a more materialist or relativist worldview in which treating moral concepts as objective physical laws is laughably naive. The comic cleverly comments on how culturally contingent our reverence for certain philosophical traditions might be -- what we treat as the foundational texts of serious intellectual inquiry could, from a sufficiently alien perspective, read as unintentional comedy. It also touches on the genuine ongoing philosophical debate between moral realism and moral anti-realism.