Euthyphro - Plato
Euthyphro by Plato. I am currently reading The Trial and Death of Socrates, which includes the four dialogues. I will post one of these for each.
In Euthyphro, Socrates is outside the courthouse, where he is about to be tried and subsequently killed for impiety. He runs into Euthyphro, who is there to prosecute his father for the murder of a slave. A worker on the family estate had killed one of the family slaves, and Euthyphro's father had the worker bound and left in a ditch while waiting for legal advice - the worker then died. Euthyphro is completely certain that this makes his father guilty and that prosecuting him is the righteous thing to do.
Socrates, curious about that certainty, asks him to define piety. The argument begins.
Euthyphro's first line of defense is an example of piety, what he is doing now - prosecuting wrongdoing, no matter the person. Socrates dismisses this and points out that an example is not a definition.
Next comes the most popular argument: piety is what is dear to the gods. Socrates drives in what philosophy now calls the Euthyphro Dilemma: is something pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious? If the gods love something, and that makes it pious, then piety is just divine preference and arbitrary. If the gods love something because it is already pious, then piety exists independently of them entirely, and we may have arrived at it ourselves without them. Both options collapse what Euthyphro is trying to say.
Rather than engaging seriously with this, Euthyphro's responses grow shorter and hotter. His next definitions never land, and Socrates points out that they are going in circles. Euthyphro, obviously pissed, says he has things to do and leaves. That is the whole dialogue, and most readers come out arguing theology.
When I was 14, I was enamored by the theological debate of the great and wonderful Euthyphro Dilemma. Those were my Reddit atheist days. I find arguments like this on the existence or non-existence of God to be quite boring now. What I would like to focus on is the character of Euthyphro.
Euthyphro represents someone that Socrates spent his life interrogating, one who is certain of a stance but unable to explain the grounds of that certainty. This dialogue also feels like one of the clearest pictures of what Socrates may actually have been like: less a mouthpiece for Plato’s ideas than a figure of relentless curiosity. Inside the dialogue, nothing is resolved. Euthyphro is not converted, Socrates receives no definition, and the argument circles back on itself.
The failure of Euthyphro is not what is obvious on the page. It is not due to his acting without a complete understanding of piety; nobody has that, and Socrates would be the first to say he did not either. The fault is narrower: he was not open to seriously engaging with the decision he made. Socrates gave him the opportunity, and Euthyphro used each opportunity to deflect. He left because answering seriously would have required him to doubt himself, and that is something most humans, myself included, are unable and unwilling to do.