Plato wrote a bunch of dialogues. The Euthyphro is one of the shortest. In this post, we will understand the Euthyphro dialogue.

The Setup

Athens, 399 BCE. Socrates is at the court of the king-archon because a man named Meletus has indicted him for impiety. Corrupting the youth and inventing new gods.

Outside the same court he runs into Euthyphro. Euthyphro is there to file murder charges against his own father. Here is the story. A laborer on the family estate killed a household slave in drunken anger. Euthyphro's father bound the laborer, threw him in a ditch, and sent someone to ask the priests what the correct ritual procedure was. The laborer died in the ditch before the messenger came back. Hunger, cold, and his bonds. Euthyphro believes his father is guilty of murder by negligence and that prosecuting him is the pious thing to do. His entire family thinks he has lost his mind.

In Athenian religion, murder caused pollution (miasma). If you knowingly kept company with a killer without ritual purification, the pollution spread to you. So Euthyphro is not just making a family decision. He is claiming he has expert, esoteric knowledge of piety, the kind that lets him navigate a case his whole family cannot agree on.

Socrates hears this and sees an opportunity. He is facing impiety charges himself. If Euthyphro genuinely knows what piety is, Socrates can learn from him and use that in court. So he asks. What is piety?

One thing to understand before we get into the answers. Socrates is not asking for examples of pious actions. He wants the form, the single thing present in every pious act and absent in every impious act. Something he can look at like a model and use to evaluate any action at all. This distinction between an instance and a definition is what every single answer in this dialogue misses.

Definition 1: What I Am Doing Right Now

Euthyphro says piety is to do what he himself is doing right now. Prosecuting wrongdoers, be it about murder, temple robbery, or anything else, regardless of who they are. And he backs this up with a divine precedent. Zeus himself bound his own father Cronus because Cronus unjustly swallowed his sons. So prosecuting one's father is not crazy. It is what the gods do.

Socrates does not even argue about the Zeus example. He just points out the category error. That is one instance of a pious action, not a definition. There are many other pious actions. Giving one case does not tell us what makes any of them pious. What is the form that makes all pious actions pious?

Euthyphro agrees there are many pious actions and tries again.

Definition 2: What Is Dear to the Gods

Now we get an actual definition. Piety is what is dear to the gods. Impiety is what is not.

Socrates says splendid, this is the kind of answer I wanted. Now let us examine whether it is true.

He reminds Euthyphro of something Euthyphro already agreed to earlier in the conversation. The gods are in a state of discord. They are at odds with each other. They have enmities and even wars, exactly like the stories the poets tell and the ones embroidered on the robe of Athena carried up to the Acropolis. Euthyphro confirmed all of this is true.

So here is the problem Socrates raises. What kinds of things cause disagreement that cannot be settled? Not numbers. If you and I disagree about which number is greater, we just count and resolve it. Not size. We measure. Not weight. We weigh. These disputes get resolved because there are procedures for settling them.

But what about the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad? Those are the things people genuinely fight over and cannot settle, because there is no neutral procedure. And that is exactly what the gods must be disagreeing about too, since they are at odds with each other.

So different gods consider different things just, beautiful, good. And each god loves what it considers good and hates the opposite. Which means the same action can be loved by some gods and hated by others. Which means under Definition 2, the same action would be both pious and impious at the same time.

Socrates puts it directly. Euthyphro's own action, prosecuting his father, might be pleasing to Zeus but displeasing to Cronus and Uranus, pleasing to Hephaestus but displeasing to Hera. The definition gives you contradictory answers for the same case.

Euthyphro tries to escape. He says surely on this particular subject, whether unjust killing must be punished, no gods would disagree with each other.

Socrates closes that exit. Think about how humans disagree. Nobody actually disputes the principle that wrongdoers should be punished. What they dispute is the specifics. Did this person actually do wrong? What exactly happened? When? The dispute is always about particular cases, not abstract principles. The gods would be the same. They might agree in the abstract that unjust killers should be punished, but they can still disagree about whether this specific killing was unjust.

And even if we grant that all gods agree on Euthyphro's case, that does not save the definition. Because the definition was "what the gods love is pious." Even if all gods agree here, we already showed that the same thing can be loved and hated by different gods in other cases. The definition still produces contradictions.

Definition 2 Revised: What All the Gods Love

Socrates himself proposes the fix. What if we say: piety is what all the gods love, impiety is what all the gods hate, and whatever splits divine opinion is neither or both?

Euthyphro agrees. Yes, that is what he would say.

Socrates says good, lets examine it. And then he asks the most famous question in the dialogue.

Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?

This is the Euthyphro Dilemma. Two options.

Option A. Piety is prior. Things are pious independently, and the gods love them because they are pious. The gods are tracking something that already has value.

Option B. Divine love is prior. Things are pious because the gods love them. There is no independent standard. The gods' approval is what makes something pious.

Euthyphro does not understand the question at first, so Socrates works through it carefully using simpler examples. Something carried is a "carried thing" because it is being carried, not the other way around. Something seen is a "thing seen" because it is being seen. Something led is a "thing led" because it is being led. The state is always downstream of the act. A thing does not get carried because it is "a carried thing." It becomes "a carried thing" because something carries it.

The same goes for love. A thing is "something loved" because it is being loved by someone. That status comes from the love, not the other way around.

Now. Euthyphro already agreed that the pious is being loved because it is pious. That means piety is the prior thing, the reason the love happens. But "god-loved" works in the opposite direction, it gets its character from the loving. So the two are pointing in opposite directions and cannot be the same thing.

Conclusion: "god-loved" is a property pious things have as a result of being pious. It is not what piety is. Socrates says it plainly. You did not tell me what the pious is. You told me an affect of it, a quality it happens to have. The pious is god-loved, sure. But that tells me nothing about what piety actually is in itself.

At this point Euthyphro basically admits defeat on this one. He says whatever proposition they put forward goes around and refuses to stay put. Socrates jokes that his definitions behave like the statues of Daedalus, the legendary craftsman who made statues that could walk. They move and will not stay in place. Euthyphro says no, it is Socrates who is the Daedalus here, making everything move. Socrates says fair enough, but he would rather have stable answers and is clever without wanting to be. Lets keep going.

Definition 3: Piety Is the Part of Justice Concerned with the Care of the Gods

Socrates pushes forward and gets Euthyphro to agree that everything pious is also just. But is everything just also pious? Not necessarily. Piety might be a part of justice, not all of it.

He explains this with an example about fear and shame. A poet wrote: "where there is fear there is also shame." Socrates disagrees. People fear disease and poverty but they are not ashamed of those things. So fear does not always come with shame. But the reverse is true. Where there is shame, there is always fear, because anyone who feels shame is afraid of having a reputation for wickedness. So shame is a part of fear, not equal to it. Fear covers more ground. Wherever you have shame you have fear, but not the other way around.

Same structure applies to piety and justice. Wherever you have piety you have justice, but not wherever you have justice do you have piety. Piety is a part of justice.

So now the question is: which part? If the pious is a part of the just, what specific part?

Euthyphro answers. The part of justice concerned with the care of the gods is piety. The part concerned with the care of men is the rest of justice.

Socrates likes this. But he immediately asks: what do you mean by care? In every other domain, care aims at the benefit of the thing being cared for. Horse breeders care for horses and horses become better. Hunters care for dogs. Farmers care for cattle. Care improves the object. So does piety improve the gods? Do our pious actions make the gods better?

Euthyphro says absolutely not. That is not what he means.

Definition 3a: Piety Is the Service Slaves Give Their Masters

Euthyphro adjusts. The kind of care he means is not improvement-care. It is service. The kind a slave gives a master.

Socrates accepts this framing and asks the next question. Every service aims at producing something. Service to doctors produces health. Service to shipbuilders produces ships. Service to housebuilders produces houses. Every service has a goal it is working toward. So what excellent goal are the gods working toward that our service helps them achieve?

Euthyphro says the gods achieve many fine things.

Socrates says yes, so do generals. But you can easily say the main thing generals are working toward is victory in war. Farmers achieve many things too, but the main point is producing food. What is the main point of what the gods are doing, that our service contributes to?

Euthyphro cannot answer. He says it is a considerable task to acquire any precise knowledge of these things.

Definition 3b: Piety Is Knowing How to Pray and Sacrifice

Pushed further, Euthyphro gives something more concrete. If a man knows how to say and do what is pleasing to the gods at prayer and sacrifice, those are pious actions, the kind that preserve private households and public affairs of state. Their opposites are impious and destroy everything.

Socrates compresses this. So piety is the knowledge of how to sacrifice and pray? To sacrifice is to make a gift to the gods. To pray is to beg from the gods. So piety is the knowledge of how to give to and beg from the gods correctly.

Euthyphro agrees.

Definition 3c: Piety Is a Trading Skill Between Gods and Men

Socrates follows the logic one more step. If piety is knowing how to correctly give to and receive from the gods, it sounds like a kind of trading skill, an art of exchange between gods and men.

Euthyphro reluctantly agrees. Trading, yes, if you want to call it that.

Then Socrates asks the trap question. What do the gods actually get from us in this exchange? We receive everything good from the gods. What do they receive from us? Euthyphro says we give them honor, reverence, and what pleases them.

Socrates closes it. So the pious is what pleases the gods.

But that is the same as "what is dear to the gods."

We are right back at Definition 2. After the entire detour through care, service, prayer, sacrifice, and exchange, the argument has made a full circle and arrived exactly where it started. At a definition that was already shown to fail.

The End

Euthyphro says he is in a hurry and has to go.

This is intentional. The dialogue is aporetic, from the Greek aporia, without a path forward. Euthyphro entered the conversation certain enough about piety to prosecute his own father on that certainty. He leaves unable to say what that certainty is actually based on.

Socrates is not satisfied. He says Euthyphro has cast him down from a great hope. He wanted to learn the nature of piety and use it to defend himself against Meletus. Now he has nothing. The dialogue failed to produce what it was looking for.

This is the first in a series reading through Plato's complete works. Next: the Apology