Euthyphro Dialogue

An essay discussing the nature of piety.

In the Euthyphro dialogue, Socrates sets out to discover the nature of piety, an ancient Greek virtue synonymous with reverence. Socrates is concerned with how one can be pious, and so must first discover precisely what piety is. He questions Euthyphro, a well-known authority on religious matters, about piety, as it is surely something he should know about. After all, he is charging his own father with indictment for murder. This accusation strikes Socrates as morally questionable in that Euthyphro is convicting a member of his own family (a stigmatized action in Greek culture). Moreover, the other Athenians believed that the murder was morally permissible in that Euthyphro’s father killed another murderer. For those reasons, many thought the indictment to be both impious and unjust.  However, Euthyphro claims to be superior in understanding of piousness than his peers, of whom he says, “little do they know…about the gods’ positions on the pious and the impious!” (101). However, as the dialogue continues, the reader quickly discovers that Euthyphro is equally as ignorant as his peers and cannot suffice to provide an adequate definition of piety.

Euthyphro fails in providing an explanation of piety that passes Socrates’ rather rigorous test for definition. When Socrates’ asks a question about what something is, such as, “what is the pious?” – he is seeking an answer that fulfils three specific criteria, namely, the criteria of: coextension, explanation, and information. A definition is coextensive if and only if it picks out precisely the properties that are universal in all cases of piety (or any other virtue) and only those properties. If the definition explains only why some things are pious, it fails in being coextensive. Moreover, these coextensive properties must be intrinsic to piety and not additional or superfluous properties that may be resultant or supervenient on the pious. To be explanatory, Euthyphro must provide a reason for why something is pious. It is not enough to say merely that some thing just is pious. A Socratic definition must explain why it is that the very thing is pious or impious at all. Or, how is it that the object is participating in the pious? And finally, a definition must be informative in that it must give some information about the identity of piety beyond synonymy. For example, it is not informative to say that redness is the experience a normal person participates in when looking at red things. (Unless, perhaps, the emphasis is being put on redness being just an experience.) However, it is informative to say that redness is a particular resultant experience normal people have when light is perceived at a wavelength of 650 nanometers. The latter definition informs us about why one experiences redness beyond just saying, ‘because he does’. As hard as he tries, Euthyphro cannot seem to give an account of piety that satisfies all three of these criteria.

Socrates begins by asking Euthyphro about the nature of the pious. He questions what sort of thing is holy or unholy in not just the case of murder but in all matters. He also asks, is piety the opposite of impiety and is there one characteristic that makes pious things pious and impious things impious? (101d). Euthyphro begins by first proposing that piety is precisely what he is doing, namely prosecuting the unjust. And so impiety is forgoing the prosecution of the unjust. He then compares himself to Zeus to show that the Gods must agree that it is pious to indict one’s own family to preserve justice, as Zeus had done himself in Greek mythology. (102e). Socrates responds that while Euthyphro might be right about his action being pious, he has not yet succeeded to accurately teach him about the nature or essence of piety itself.  That is, this first definition fails to be coextensive. Piety is not exhausted by only those actions of indicting the unjust. Socrates wants not to learn about, “one or two of the many pieties, but rather about the form itself, by virtue of which all pieties are pious.” (103d.) To get at the form or idea of the Pious, Euthyphro is going to have to move away from particular instantiations towards abstraction.

On his second attempt, Euthyphro suggests that the what’s loved by the gods is pious and what’s not loved by the gods is impious. Socrates congratulates him for this proposal – as it appears to satisfy all three of his criteria of definition, at least prima facie. However, Socrates tries to object by claiming that the gods often disagree and quarrel over petty affairs (as the Greek gods were largely anthropomorphic). Insofar as they have disputes in the first place, they must sometimes disagree on what they love. So then, some object can be both pious and impious in that one god may love it and another may hate it. Euthyphro quickly disregards this objection simply by explaining that the gods don’t disagree on what they love (in the case of the pious) and so Socrates lets him have this point, probably as it is difficult to argue about the gods, especially with a religious person like Euthyphro. So the revised definition of the pious is that which all of the gods love.

Socrates then asks about the order of the explanation of piety; if the pious is the god-loved, as Euthyphro proposed; does the gods’ loving an object make it pious, or do the gods love an object because it is pious? In other words, are the god’s affecting an object and thus making it pious or is the piety already in the objects, as it were, consequently affecting the gods so that they love it? Euthyphro mistakenly agrees that an object or act is pious because the gods love it, not loved because it is pious. By posing the question as a sort of duality, Socrates sneakily forces Euthyphro to choose between one of two apparent options. However, Euthyphro might have appealed to a different explanation of why an object is pious, thus avoiding the problems that are to come form identifying the pious with the that which the gods love.

After Euthyphro tells Socrates that the pious is pious because the gods love it, Socrates objects that, “then the god-loved is not what’s pious, Euthyphro, nor is the pious what’s god-loved, as you claim, but one differs from the other.” (107e). At this point, Euthyphro becomes confused (as does likely the reader). Perhaps it will be clearest to formalize Socrates’ argument as follows:

(1)  If the gods love x, then x is god-loved.

(2)  If x is god-loved, it is god-loved because the gods love it.

NOT: The gods love x because x is god-loved.

(3)  The gods love what is pious because it is pious.

(4)  The pious = the god-loved.

(5)  If the gods love what is pious because it is pious, then the gods love

what is god-loved because it is god-loved. (From 3,4)

(6) So, the pious ¹ the god-loved. (From 2,5)

Premises (1) and (2) result from Socrates’ discussion about affection. (107b). Premises (3) and (4) are simply the proposals Euthyphro set forth. The sub-conclusion in (5) fails to be informative in that it defines piety as a property of being god-loved but doesn’t explain why a pious object is loved by the gods other than it instantiating the property of being god-loved or pious. He says that the pious is the relationship the gods have to an object and they have that relationship simply because the object has the property of having the relationship, which is a circular explanation and fails to inform us of anything. And beyond this, Socrates show’s that it just cannot be that the pious equals the god-loved, as Euthyphro claimed, because they’re related in rather opposite ways. This is shown by the contradiction in affection from (2) and (5). It can’t be that the gods love an object because it is god-loved. However, Euthyphro defines the pious simply as the god-loved and also says the gods love an object because it is pious. By substitution, the gods love an object that is pious because it is god-loved, which proves to be a blatant contradiction. Thus the pious must not be the god-loved. Of this, he says, “one is lovable because it’s loved, whereas the other is loved because it’s lovable. (108b). And insofar as this attempt fails to show what piety actually is (rather only that it is not the god-loved), it fails to meet Socrates information criterion.

At this point the dialogue shifts from the idea or form of piety to its relation to other virtues, or more specifically to the Just. Euthyphro puts forth a description of piety as it being a subset of the Just that deals with the gods, while all other just acts are profane. (110e.) So piety is a sort of tending to the gods, as it were.  Socrates questions this relationship to the gods in that it seems strange to think that humans can tend to the gods analogously to how humans tend to horses, dogs and cattle. In all of the latter cases, there are clearly benefactors of the act of tending, namely the animals. But, Socrates asks, “if piety is tending to the gods, does it benefit the gods and make the gods better? Would you concede that whenever you do something pious, you’re making some god better?” (111c).

Euthyphro surely doesn’t mean to say that the gods benefit from our insignificant and human actions by being bettered by us. So he changes his account of piety to the sort of tending that slaves provide to their masters. (111d). Rather than the gods benefiting from this service, they are pleased by pious acts. These services are those “preserve both the private welfare of households and the common welfare of the city, whereas those that are the opposite of pleasing are unholy, and they, of course, overturn and destroy everything”, according to Euthyphro. (112b). However, Socrates is quick to point out that what is pleasing to the gods is so because the gods love these acts. And so now Euthyphro is again saying that the pious is that which is god-loved, a proposal already refuted earlier in the dialogue. And so finally, Euthyphro gives up.

Although Socrates does seem to be the victor in the dispute, Euthyphro certainly did make some noteworthy points. Had he been more prepared to argue, or better trained, he may well have been able to put forth a satisfactory Socratic definition of piety. He seemed to have been close in saying that the pious is that which the gods love; however, he would have had to come up with an explanation outside of the gods themselves to avoid circularity or contradiction. Moreover, it seems that with the description of the pious as maintaining personal and public welfare, Euthyphro could have come up with an explanation of piety outside of those acts as merely being loved by the gods. For example, perhaps those acts are pious because they preserve the creation of the gods, thus paying the gods a sort of thankful reverence for creation or existence itself. The gods then are pleased not just because the acts are god-loved, but rather because they are aimed at preserving the objects of their godly labor. So it at least is feasible Euthyphro could have gotten around Socrates worry of returning to the initial explanatory problem.

A contemporary reader of the dialogue might question the relevance a dispute over piety has in the modern world. There are no longer many religious teachers preaching about piety on the street, as in the ancient Greek world. However, the lesson learned from the Euthyphro can be extended to other religious issues as well. For example, many religious people base their morality on God’s law. For these believers, the rightness of an act depends entirely on the command of God. A similar question to what Socrates posed to Euthyphro concerning the order of explanation can be asked to those who believe in this divine command theory. That is, one may inquire whether an act is right because God commands it, or God commands it because it is right in itself. This is very similar to asking whether something is pious because it’s god-loved or loved by the gods because it is pious. So although the actual case of piety might be somewhat irrelevant today, the lesson learned from the Euthyphro dialogue can be extended to a number of other contingent religious issues. So more than two thousand years after Plato wrote his Socratic dialogues, one can still be puzzled by some of the disputes.

NYU Year 3 History of Ancient Phil.