Euthyphro

Based on Wikipedia: Euthyphro

Picture this: a man is about to put his own elderly father on trial for murder. Not because he witnessed the crime. Not because anyone is demanding justice. But because he believes—with the unshakeable confidence of someone who claims to speak for the gods—that prosecuting his father is the pious thing to do.

This is Euthyphro, and his chance encounter with Socrates outside an Athenian courthouse around 399 BC would produce one of the most influential philosophical puzzles in human history. A question so profound that theologians, ethicists, and philosophers are still wrestling with it two and a half thousand years later.

Two Men at the Courthouse

The setting matters. Socrates is waiting at the Porch of the King Archon—essentially a preliminary hearing before his famous trial for impiety, the one that would end with his execution. He's been accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and introducing strange new gods. In just a few weeks, he'll deliver his legendary defense speech, documented in Plato's Apology. Then he'll drink hemlock and die.

But today, he's still alive, still curious, still doing what he does best: asking uncomfortable questions.

Enter Euthyphro, a self-proclaimed prophet in his mid-forties. He's at the same courthouse, but for a very different reason. He's prosecuting his own father for murder.

The backstory is grim. Euthyphro's father owned land on the island of Naxos, a piece of property that came to him through an Athenian colonial program. One of his workers—a hired hand—had killed a household slave in a drunken rage. Euthyphro's father bound the murderer in chains, threw him in a ditch, and sent a messenger to Athens to ask religious authorities what he should do. Before the messenger returned, the bound man died of exposure and neglect.

Was this murder? Manslaughter? Justified restraint of a killer that tragically went wrong? These are exactly the kinds of questions that make the case so morally complex.

Euthyphro's own family is horrified that he's prosecuting his father. They argue it's impious for a son to bring charges against his own flesh and blood, especially over the death of a murderer who wasn't even a family member. But Euthyphro dismisses their concerns. As a prophet, he insists, he knows exactly what piety requires. And piety requires this prosecution.

Socrates Spots an Opportunity

Here's where Socrates gets interested. He's facing charges of impiety himself. And here's a man who claims to know precisely what piety is—so precisely that he's willing to prosecute his own father over it.

"Teach me," Socrates essentially says. "If you're so certain about piety that you'd take this extraordinary action, you must have a clear definition. Share it with me. Maybe it will help with my trial."

This is classic Socratic method. Socrates rarely claims to know anything himself. Instead, he finds people who claim expertise and asks them to explain it. The explanations almost always fall apart under questioning. Not because Socrates is trying to humiliate anyone, but because concepts we think we understand often dissolve when we try to define them precisely.

Piety was no exception.

First Attempt: Piety Is What I'm Doing Right Now

Euthyphro's first definition is charmingly concrete: piety is prosecuting wrongdoers, even if they're your own family. Just look at Zeus! He overthrew his father Cronus, who had overthrown his own father Uranus. If the king of the gods can punish his father for wrongdoing, surely Euthyphro can do the same.

Socrates immediately spots the problem. This isn't a definition at all. It's an example. Saying "piety is what I'm doing now" is like saying "a number is seven." It might be true that seven is a number, but it doesn't tell you what makes something a number.

What Socrates wants is the essential characteristic that makes all pious acts pious. The thing they have in common. The quality that, if present, guarantees piousness.

Euthyphro tries again.

Second Attempt: What Pleases the Gods

This definition sounds much better: piety is what pleases the gods.

Socrates likes the form of this answer. It's general. It's not just pointing at one example. But there's a devastating problem lurking in Greek mythology itself.

The gods disagree. Constantly. Violently. The Trojan War happened because gods took different sides. Greek myths are full of divine feuds, jealousies, and contradictions. If piety is what pleases the gods, and the gods disagree about what pleases them, then the same action could be both pious and impious simultaneously.

Consider Euthyphro's own case. Some gods might approve of punishing a man who let a killer die. Others might be appalled at a son prosecuting his father. Without divine consensus, this definition collapses into contradiction.

This problem might seem quaint to modern readers—surely we don't believe in squabbling Greek gods anymore. But the underlying issue is profound. If morality comes from divine command, what happens when divine commands conflict? What happens when different religious traditions, or different interpretations within the same tradition, disagree?

Euthyphro adjusts his answer.

Third Attempt: What All the Gods Love

Now we're getting somewhere. Piety, Euthyphro says, is what all the gods love. Impiety is what all the gods hate. Actions that some gods love and others hate fall into neither category.

This sidesteps the disagreement problem. If all the gods love something, there's no contradiction.

But Socrates isn't satisfied. He poses what is now called the Euthyphro dilemma, one of the most famous questions in the history of philosophy:

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?

Read that again slowly. It sounds almost like a tongue twister, but it cuts to the heart of how we understand morality and its relationship to divine authority.

The Dilemma Unpacked

Let's break this down with a more familiar example. Consider the statement "murder is wrong." A religious person might say God commands us not to murder. But why? Two possibilities:

Option One: Murder is wrong because God forbids it. God's command is what makes it wrong. If God commanded murder, murder would become right. Divine will is the source of moral truth.

Option Two: God forbids murder because murder is wrong. God recognizes an independent moral truth and commands accordingly. Murder would be wrong even if God didn't forbid it—God is simply reporting the moral facts.

Both options create problems.

If you choose Option One, morality becomes arbitrary. God could command anything—torture, genocide, cruelty—and it would automatically become good. "Good" would just mean "whatever God says," emptying the concept of any independent meaning. We couldn't even praise God for being good, because "good" would just mean "God-like."

If you choose Option Two, God becomes less central to morality. If moral truths exist independently of God's will, we could theoretically discover them without God. God becomes a messenger of morality rather than its source. This diminishes divine authority in a way many believers find troubling.

This is the Euthyphro dilemma, and it has haunted theology and ethics ever since Plato first articulated it.

Socrates Walks Euthyphro Through the Logic

In the dialogue itself, Socrates makes the problem concrete through careful reasoning.

When we say something is "beloved," what do we mean? We mean someone loves it. The beloved becomes beloved through the act of being loved. This seems obvious—a loved child is loved because someone loves them.

Euthyphro agrees to this.

But wait. Euthyphro also said the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious. The piousness comes first. The gods recognize something already pious and respond with love.

These two claims contradict each other. If the pious is loved because it's already pious, then piousness is an independent quality that the gods are responding to. It's not created by their love. But if something becomes beloved through being loved, then divine love would create belovedness, not respond to pre-existing piousness.

Euthyphro can't have it both ways. Either piousness is prior to divine love (the gods love it because it's pious), or divine love creates piousness (it's pious because they love it). Saying "piety is what the gods love" doesn't actually tell us what piety is—it only tells us how the gods feel about it.

A New Direction: Piety as Part of Justice

Frustrated but patient, Socrates tries a different approach. Maybe piety is a subset of justice. All pious acts are just, but not all just acts are pious. Just as all even numbers are numbers, but not all numbers are even.

This makes intuitive sense. Piety seems related to justice but more specific. What makes it specific?

Euthyphro suggests piety involves "looking after the gods." But this creates its own problem. When we look after something—a horse, a child, a garden—we improve it. Are we really improving the gods through our pious acts? That would be hubris of the highest order, and the Greek gods were famously hostile to human pride.

Euthyphro backs off. He means service, not improvement. Piety is a kind of service to the gods, the way a servant serves a master or a sailor serves a captain.

Socrates asks the obvious follow-up: service toward what end? Servants of doctors help produce health. Servants of builders help produce houses. What do servants of the gods help produce?

Euthyphro fumbles. The gods produce many fine things, he says vaguely. Pressed for specifics, he retreats to his earlier definition: piety is what the gods love.

They've gone in a circle.

One Last Try: Sacrifice and Prayer

Euthyphro makes one final attempt. Piety is knowing the right sacrifices and prayers—what to give the gods and what to ask from them.

Socrates sees where this leads. So piety is a kind of commerce? We give the gods honor and esteem; they give us benefits in return? A transaction?

Euthyphro objects that it's not quite a transaction. Our gifts to the gods aren't payment for services. They're expressions of honor, esteem, and favor.

But wait—gifts that please the gods? Things the gods love?

They're right back where they started. Piety is what pleases the gods, what the gods love. This tells us nothing about what piety actually is in itself.

No Resolution

The dialogue ends inconclusively. Euthyphro suddenly remembers he has somewhere else to be. Socrates remarks wryly that he's learned nothing useful for his upcoming trial.

This is what scholars call an "aporetic" dialogue—from the Greek word for "puzzlement" or "impasse." Many of Plato's early dialogues end this way, with the question unresolved and everyone more confused than when they started.

But this isn't failure. Recognizing that we don't understand something we thought we understood is genuine philosophical progress. Euthyphro walked into that courthouse convinced he knew what piety was—so convinced he was willing to prosecute his own father. He left (we hope) considerably less certain.

There's an ancient tradition claiming that after this conversation, Euthyphro was persuaded to drop the case against his father. Plato's own writings don't confirm this, but it's a satisfying thought.

Understanding Athenian Religion

To fully appreciate this dialogue, it helps to understand how different Greek religion was from modern monotheism.

There was no sacred scripture in the way that Jews, Christians, or Muslims have holy texts. There was no unified doctrine. Religion meant rituals, sacrifices, festivals, and respect for specific deities.

Priests might worship one god almost exclusively. A priest of Apollo had no particular obligation to Poseidon. Euthyphro himself uses Zeus as his primary example while seeming to disregard what happened between Uranus and Cronus—even though he initially cited that violent succession as precedent for prosecuting his own father.

This theological flexibility made the question "what do the gods want?" genuinely complicated. There was no single authoritative answer. Different traditions, different cities, different families might have different practices and beliefs, all equally "religious."

The Dialogue's Legacy

The Euthyphro has been read continuously for over two thousand years.

Fragments of the text survive on papyrus from the second century. In the third century BC, the Epicurean philosopher Metrodorus of Lampsacus wrote a pamphlet attacking it—the oldest known literary criticism of the dialogue, though the pamphlet itself is lost.

Later in antiquity, the scholar Thrasyllus of Mendes organized Plato's works into groups of four, placing the Euthyphro first in the first group, followed by the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo—the dialogues covering Socrates' trial, imprisonment, and death. This arrangement made dramatic sense: the Euthyphro shows Socrates on his way to the preliminary hearing.

Some ancient teachers used the Euthyphro as the first dialogue for students new to Plato. Its relative simplicity and clear structure made it an ideal introduction to Socratic method.

The second-century philosopher Numenius of Apamea proposed that Euthyphro wasn't a real person at all. He was, Numenius suggested, a literary device representing Athenian popular religion. Plato couldn't attack conventional religion directly—that's what got Socrates killed—so he created this fictional prophet to demonstrate its intellectual bankruptcy.

Whether Euthyphro was real or invented, his confidence makes him a perfect target for Socratic questioning. He represents everyone who holds firm opinions without examining their foundations.

The Dilemma Through History

The Euthyphro dilemma didn't stay confined to discussions of Greek polytheism. It adapted seamlessly to monotheism and continues to challenge religious ethics today.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Cambridge Platonists Ralph Cudworth and Samuel Clarke revived the dilemma in debates about the foundation of morality. Does God command things because they are good? Or are things good because God commands them?

Various solutions have been proposed. Some theologians argue that God's nature is goodness itself, so the dilemma presents a false choice—goodness and God's will are identical, not separate things that could conflict. Others accept one horn of the dilemma and embrace its consequences.

The twentieth-century philosopher Peter Geach criticized the dilemma from a different angle. He argued that the dialogue's approach is backwards. We can't define piety first and then identify pious acts. We have to start with acts we recognize as pious and work toward understanding what they have in common. The demand for a prior definition puts the cart before the horse.

These debates continue. The Euthyphro dilemma remains a standard topic in philosophy of religion courses and appears whenever someone claims that morality requires God, or that divine commands determine right and wrong.

A Dialogue About Dialogue

Beyond its explicit philosophical content, the Euthyphro demonstrates something about how philosophical inquiry works.

Euthyphro arrives certain. He has a clear answer and is acting on it with confidence so extreme that he's prosecuting his own elderly father. But certainty isn't the same as understanding. When pressed to explain his certainty, to define the concept he claims to grasp, he discovers that his confidence was hollow.

Socrates, by contrast, professes ignorance. He claims not to know what piety is. But this ignorance is productive. It allows him to ask genuine questions, to follow arguments wherever they lead, to notice contradictions that someone defending a position might overlook.

This is the Socratic paradox: the wisest person is the one who knows they don't know. Euthyphro's confident ignorance is far more dangerous than Socrates' aware uncertainty.

The dialogue is set just weeks before Socrates' execution. Athens is about to kill its wisest citizen on charges of impiety. Meanwhile, Euthyphro—who can't coherently define piety—confidently prosecutes his father in piety's name.

The irony is devastating and intentional.

Reading the Dialogue Today

The Euthyphro rewards rereading. On first encounter, it might seem like a clever logical puzzle, a philosophical gotcha that traps Euthyphro in contradiction.

But there's more here than technique. The dialogue asks how we can be certain about moral questions. What grounds our ethical confidence? When we say something is right or wrong, good or bad, sacred or profane, what makes it so?

If we appeal to authority—divine commands, cultural traditions, expert opinion—we face versions of the Euthyphro dilemma. Do we follow the authority because it's right? Or is it right because we follow it? The first option makes the authority optional; the second makes rightness arbitrary.

If we try to define moral concepts directly, we face Euthyphro's problem. Our definitions either point to examples without capturing the essence, or they rely on other concepts that themselves need definition, or they circle back to where we started.

Maybe the point isn't to solve these problems but to recognize them. Intellectual humility isn't weakness. Knowing that we don't fully understand piety, justice, goodness, or any other moral concept might make us more careful, more open to inquiry, more willing to question our confident assumptions.

That's the gift Socrates offers Euthyphro. It's a gift Euthyphro isn't quite ready to receive—he rushes off, claiming other business. But the invitation stands open, for Euthyphro and for every reader since.

What do we really know about what we think we know? And are we brave enough to find out?