Euthyphro

Overview

Twenty pages, a single conversation, and the usual first thing anyone reads of Plato. It is placed first in the group of four dialogues around the trial and death of Socrates, before the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo, and it is the natural entry point to all of them.

The setting does the work. Socrates is at the porch of the King Archon, the magistrate who handled religious offences, because Meletus has indicted him for impiety and corrupting the young. He is there about the charge that will kill him. And the man he meets there is a professional expert on exactly the thing he is accused of getting wrong.

Euthyphro is a seer, a religious specialist, and he is at the court on a startling errand: he is prosecuting his own father for murder. A hired labourer on the family farm in Naxos killed a slave in a drunken quarrel; Euthyphro’s father bound him in a ditch and sent to Athens for advice on what to do; the man died of exposure and hunger before the messenger returned. Euthyphro’s relatives are appalled that he would prosecute his father over the death of a labourer who was himself a killer. He is certain he is right, and he is certain because he knows what piety is.

Socrates, who is about to be tried for impiety, says he would very much like to learn.

What happens

The irony is set out at once. Socrates says that if Euthyphro knows what piety is, then he should take Euthyphro as his teacher, and in his own defence he can say he now has expert instruction. He says this pleasantly and Euthyphro does not notice.

First definition: piety is what I am doing now, prosecuting a wrongdoer. Socrates says this is an example, not a definition. He wants the form itself, the one thing by which all pious things are pious, so that he can look at it and use it as a standard for judging cases. This demand, repeated across the early dialogues, is the beginning of philosophical ethics.

Second definition: the pious is what is dear to the gods. Socrates points out that on Euthyphro’s own account of the gods, taken from the stories he believes, the gods quarrel constantly, and they quarrel about exactly the things that cannot be settled by measurement: the just and unjust, the noble and shameful, the good and bad. So the same act will be loved by some gods and hated by others, and will be both pious and impious.

Third definition: the pious is what all the gods love. Euthyphro repairs it, and Socrates accepts the repair and then asks the question the dialogue is famous for. Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?

The argument that follows is careful. A thing being carried is in that state because someone carries it, not the reverse. Euthyphro agrees that the gods love the pious because it is pious, that is, they recognise something already there. But then being loved by the gods is a consequence of piety and not what piety is. It tells us something that happens to pious things, not what makes them so. The definition has described an effect and called it a cause.

Fourth definition: piety is the part of justice concerned with the gods. Socrates likes this better and pushes on the relation of part to whole. What part of justice? Euthyphro says the part concerned with the care of the gods.

Socrates asks what kind of care. Caring for horses improves horses, caring for dogs improves dogs. Does our piety improve the gods? Euthyphro retreats to service, as a slave serves a master.

Then the question that finishes it. When a servant serves a shipwright, the product is a ship; a doctor’s assistant helps produce health. What splendid thing do the gods produce with our help? Euthyphro cannot say, because any answer implies the gods need us for something.

Fifth attempt: piety is knowing how to pray and sacrifice. Euthyphro tries a practical answer, and Socrates draws it out as a science of asking from and giving to the gods, a kind of trading. But what do we give that they need, and what do they gain? Euthyphro says gratification and what is dear to them, and they are back at the third definition, going in a circle.

Euthyphro complains that the arguments will not stay put, and Socrates jokes that he is descended from Daedalus, whose statues walked away. Socrates presses once more, offering to start again from the beginning, and Euthyphro says he is in a hurry and leaves.

He is presumably still going to prosecute his father.

How to read it

Read it twice in one sitting. It is twenty pages and the second reading is where the structure shows.

Work through 10a to 11b slowly, with a pencil. The dilemma passage is short, the Greek grammar behind it is awkward, and the argument is tighter than it looks. Try stating both horns in your own words and then asking which one you would accept.

Then restate it without the gods. Substitute any authority you like, a text, a community, a moral consensus, and the same fork appears: is it right because they approve it, or do they approve it because it is right? The dialogue is only incidentally about Greek religion.

Notice that the dialogue fails, and that the failure is the point. Plato’s early dialogues characteristically end without a definition, and the reader is left knowing that something he thought was obvious is not. Whether that is a literary strategy or an honest report of where Socrates got to is a real question in Plato scholarship.

Watch Euthyphro rather than only the arguments. He is not a fool. He is confident, respectable, pious, and doing something extraordinarily harsh on the strength of knowledge he does not have, and his exit is the most human moment in the dialogue.

Read the Apology straight afterwards. The same charge, the same city, and now Socrates defending in public the activity you have just watched him perform on one man. Put them together and the trial makes sense.

Questions it raises

• If God commands what is good, is there a standard above God? If God’s command makes it good, could cruelty have been right?
• Socrates rejects examples and wants the form. Is a definition really required before you can act well?
• Euthyphro is prosecuting his father. Was he right to, and does the collapse of his definition settle it?
• Every early dialogue ends in failure. Is aporia a result or an evasion?
• What would it even mean for our worship to produce something the gods need?
• Socrates says he wants to learn. Does he? What is the ethics of asking a question you know the other person cannot answer?