Make Political Philosophy Cool Again
Part I: How Can We Be Sure of What is Right or Wrong?
I hope any Plato purists among you will forgive my paraphrases and summaries of the dialogue.
Euthyphro opens in the area in front of the Athenian court. Socrates is there because he was indicted on charges of inventing new gods, refusing to believe in the existing gods, and corrupting the youth. More specifically, he was indicted on charges of impiety. (The Greek word is ὅσιος, which can be translated as pious, devout, undefiled by sin, or holy.)
As we know from historical events that took place after this dialogue, Socrates was brought to trial, convicted of impiety, and executed.
Euthyphro is in the courtyard because he is bringing charges of murder against his father. Euthyphro strikes up a conversation with Socrates and explains the facts of his case.
One day, a man, a “dependent” who worked for Euthyphro’s family, murdered a domestic servant in a fit of drunken temper. (The domestic servant was likely a woman and a slave.) Euthyphro’s father captured the murderer, tied him up, and put him in a ditch, evidently so he couldn’t escape. He then dispatched a messenger to find out from a “diviner” what he should do with the murderer. Before the messenger could return, the murderer died of cold and hunger while tied up in the ditch.
Euthyphro says this about his family’s reaction:
Euthyphro: My father and family are angry with me for taking the part of the murderer and prosecuting my father. They say that he did not kill him and that if he did, that dead man was but a murderer, and I ought not to take any notice, for that a son is impious who prosecutes a father. This shows, Socrates, how little they know what the gods think about piety and impiety.
Socrates: Good heavens, Euthyphro! Is your knowledge of religion and things pious and impious so very exact, that, supposing the circumstances to be as you state them, you are not afraid lest you too may be doing an impious thing in bringing an action against your father?
I bolded “supposing the circumstances to be as you state them” to emphasize that Socrates isn’t saying that bringing charges against one’s father is per se impious. He is asking Euthyphro whether, under these circumstances, he is afraid he may be behaving impiously by bringing the charges.
Euthyphro: The best of Euthyphro, and that which distinguishes him from other men, is his exact knowledge of all such matters. What should I be good for without it?
That’s quite a statement, right? Earlier he told Socrates that, “Every word I speak is the truth.”
Because Euthyphro is confident that he understands when an action is pious, Socrates asks to become Euthyphro’s pupil. He wants Euthyphro to teach him the meaning of impiety so that he can quote Euthyphro at his trial and thereby win an acquittal.
Euthyphro agrees to the plan. Socrates then asks a straightforward question:
Socrates: What is piety? And what is impiety?
Euthyphro: Piety is doing as I am doing; that is to say, prosecuting anyone who has committed murder, sacrilege, or any similar crime. Whether he is your father or mother, or whoever he may be makes no difference. Not to prosecute them is impiety.
Euthyphro goes on to say that because prosecuting a murderer is the right thing to do, it doesn’t matter whether the person is a relative. After all, Zeus punished (overthrew) his own father, Cronus.
Socrates points out a problem with this definition. Euthyphro has given him an example of piety, which is different from a general definition that Socrates can use to apply to other situations. What Socrates wants is “a standard to which I may look, and by which I may measure actions, whether yours or those of anyone else, and then I shall be able to say that such and such an action is pious, such another impious.”
So Euthyphro offers this standard: “Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.”
Socrates then points out a problem with this definition: The gods do not always agree. In fact, they often quarrel and disagree. Sometimes the same act is loved by some of the gods and disliked by others. Therefore, the definition fails.
Euthyphro tries again. He says that there are some matters upon which all the gods agree, and they all agree that a murderer must be punished, so he is doing what is pious.
Socrates then makes a detour and points out that when a murderer defends himself, he rarely says that murder is pious and good. Instead, he says that in his case, the murder was justified.
(Notice that the word justify contains the word just which of course has the same roots as justice. 
I just felt like pointing that out.)
Socrates tells Euthyphro that he still hasn’t defined piety. Euthyphro digs in and says. “A pious action is one that all the gods love.”
Socrates then asks: Is an action pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious?
Euthyphro doesn’t see the difference.
Socrates explains that there is an enormous difference. If something is holy because the gods love it, we can never know in advance if an action is holy. We have to wait to see what the gods think. On the other hand, if the gods love an action because it is holy, there must be a quality that all holy things contain, in which case if we understand that quality, we will know in advance whether an action is just or pious.
Euthyphro says that the gods love pious acts because they are holy.
Socrates then basically says, well then, we are back where we started! We still don’t know what makes the act pious in the first place! We don’t know why the gods love the act, so we cannot tell in advance whether an act is pious or not. Therefore, we still don’t have a working definition.
Euthyphro maintains that in his own mind, the definition of piety is clear, but he cannot explain it to Socrates because “somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us.”
Socrates, who remains serenely contemplative, asks, “Is that which is just also pious?”
Yes, says Euthyphro. He then defines the relationship between piety and justice: “Piety or holiness, Socrates, appears to me to be that part of justice which attends to the gods, as there is the other part of justice which attends to men.”
I think this is an interesting point. There is morality, or what is right. Then there are laws made by humans, which may or may not be morally correct. If a law is immoral, and you follow the law, you might be a good citizen, but not a good person. A good citizen obeys the laws and falls in line. A good person may go against the current, depending on the direction of the current.
Socrates pounces on Euthyphros use of the word “attends” which is vague and doesn’t explain the relationship of piety to the gods. Euthyphro admits that his use of the word “attends” was vague, so he tries again.
Euthyphro: Piety or holiness is learning how to please the gods in word, deed, prayer, and sacrifice.
This isn’t a bad definition of piety. But Socrates points out that this definition, too, takes us right back where we started: We cannot learn how to please the gods in word, deed, and prayer if we don’t know what pleases them in advance. Once more Socrates pushes Euthyphro for a more precise definition.
Euthyphro: Another time, Socrates; for I am in a hurry, and I must go now.
With that, Euthyphro departs.
If this was typical of the kind of encounter Socrates had on the streets of Athens, it’s no wonder he was unpopular. Who likes being told that they don’t know what they’re talking about — particularly someone who has set himself up as an expert?
Much ink has been split over whether the arguments presented are sound. Churchmen later found themselves as confused as Euthyphro. Is something good because God loves it? Or does God love it because it is good?
Because Euthyphro never defined piety in a way that satisfied Socrates, the common way to read Euthyphro is that the ending results in aporia or an impasse. I don’t see an impasse at all. I don’t remember how I understood Euthyphro when I first read it as an undergraduate philosophy major decades ago. (Yes I started out as a philosophy major.) This time around, given what I learned, I believe the dialogue does make a positive statement about the nature of piety and justice. The statement is this: despite what Euthyphro thinks, it is not easy to define concepts like holiness, righteousness, or justice. Those who are so supremely confident that they never question their own judgment are more likely to participate in evil.
In other words, the lesson to glean is that dogmatism, intellectual arrogance, and black-and-white thinking are likely to lead to injustice.
In law, we have bright-line rules and we have flexible standards, or balancing tests. Bright line rules are objective and easy to apply but often result in injustice because they don’t take into account all circumstances. Balancing tests are harder to apply, more subjective, and may end up resulting in inconsistency, but (if applied wisely) can create more justice because they can account for varying circumstances.
Euthyphro can grasp only bright line rules. Murder is bad. Murderers need to be brought to justice.
Socrates pokes holes in bright line rules. He understands that circumstances can be different and that not all murders are alike.
Another way to understand the Euthyphro vs. Socrates mindsets is through the lens of political psychologists. I have often offered political psychologist Karen Stenner’s definition of the authoritarian personality:
. . . a universal, mostly heritable predisposition rooted in a closed personality and cognitive inflexibility, which reduce one’s willingness and ability, respectively, to deal with complexity.
Euthyphro is uncomfortable with complexity. He is, to borrow another of Stenner’s phrases, a “simple-minded avoider of complexity.” Socrates, in contrast, is not only comfortable with complexity, he believes the purpose of life is to delve into the complexity of human matters. As he famously says later at his trial, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Euthyphro is also uncomfortable with Socrates’s method of questioning. He acts as if something nefarious is happening. He feels tricked. “Our arguments,” he says, “seem to turn around and walk away from us.” In the end, he recoils completely.
Elsewhere Socrates explained why he is going around Athens engaging in these kinds of conversations. When the Oracle of Delphi revealed that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, he didn’t believe it because he knew he wasn’t wise. But the oracle never lies. So he set out to prove the oracle wrong by finding a man wiser than him. His method was to closely question anyone who claimed to have wisdom. This resulted in the kind of conversations Socrates had with Euthyphro. A lot of people, like Euthyphro, became uncomfortable. Some believed that Socrates was doing something dangerous and nefarious by examining and calling into question basic “truths,” particularly those that religion and government rested upon.
The closer you look at Euthyphro, the more interesting things you can find. For example, when the men first begin talking, we learn that Euthyphro claims he always speaks the truth, yet the public response is that people laugh at him. Socrates, on the other hand, claims not to know the truth. He insists he is simply trying to discover the truth from people wiser than he is. Yet it is Socrates who has aroused so much anger among the population that he is about to be executed by irate Athenians.
Shortly after the two men begin speaking, we also learn that Socrates would never bring charges against anyone:
Euthyphro: What are you doing in the Porch of the King Archon? Surely you cannot be concerned in a suit before the King, like myself?
Socrates: Not in a suit, Euthyphro; impeachment is the word which the Athenians use.
Euthyphro: What! I suppose that someone has been prosecuting you, for I cannot believe that you are the prosecutor of another.
Socrates: Certainly not.
By the end of the dialogue, we understand why Socrates would never bring charges against anyone. To bring criminal charges against a person and seek to have the person punished, you have to be certain that the person deserves punishment, and for that, you need to believe that the behavior was not justified, which is more difficult than it sounds because you have to define “justified” and examine the behavior from all angles.
Every defense lawyer has encountered a few Euthyphros across the table. “But they broke the law!” the prosecutor says. “Therefore, they deserve punishment!” But what if they didn’t know what they did was wrong? What if the harm caused was trivial and nobody was bothered? What if, because of brain defects, they were unable to control their actions? Moreover, what do you mean by “deserved”?
“What if the defendant was an abused woman with a mental illness that wasn’t controlled because her abuser withheld her medication and one night, she ran away and hid in the park? Because she had been drinking, she stumbled and accidentally damaged public property?”
“She was drunk in the park! She was in the park after hours! She damaged property! She broke the law! I must uphold justice!” (*slams table*)
Before law school, I taught English at the college and university level. I observed that students were often quick to judge characters and slow to empathize with them. I saw this as a problem. What is the purpose of literature if not to enlarge our ability to empathize? It seems to me that point of the humanities is to make us more humane, which — it also seems to me — requires less judging and more empathy.
To prosecute is to judge. Moreover, punishment is the deliberate infliction of pain on another person. In criminal matters, the government is inflicting pain on an individual. Punishment increases the level of suffering in the world by inflicting more pain. (If you are leaping up to refute me with Kant’s theory of retribution, hold your horses. We will get to Kant farther down the road.)
If Euthyphro ever paused to consider the full story regarding his father and the servant who murdered a slave, we have no indication of that. He sees no nuance or moral ambiguity in the circumstances. He is 100% confident in his own judgment.
The dialogue is thus about the virtues of intellectual humility vs. intellectual arrogance. Those who are intellectually humble recognize the limits of their own understanding and appreciate the complexity of human situations. They are slower to judge and less likely to inadvertently (and unnecessarily) increase the level of suffering in the world.
This brings me to the famous words of Judge Learned Hand (yes that really was his name):
Learned Hand is talking about the dangers of intellectual arrogance. The philosopher Bertrand Russell quipped once that he would never die for his beliefs because “I might be wrong.”
This is what I see now in Euthyphro. Plato, of course, could not have intended his dialogue to be about TV lawyers, but what makes a literary work great is that it speaks to us across the centuries and offers perspective on the modern world.
Had Socrates lived during our current information disruption, I am sure he would question every headline. He would probe every slogan. He would pick apart every statement made by every candidate. He would not be fooled by easy answers. He would reject bumper-sticker maxims like “Justice Matters.” He would not believe whatever news sources told him if he suspected the news sources were manipulating him by confirming his biases.
I have often thought that the whole idea of political “messaging” is problematic. If we need “messaging,” there is an inherent problem with democracy. Democracy requires people able to think about complex matters. The idea that messaging is what matters assumes that people must be given simple bumper-sticker messages.
The problem is that the truth is nuanced and cannot fit onto a bumper sticker.
Someone (I have forgotten who) said, “I have a little Hamlet in me.” It seems to me that people in a functioning democracy should strive to say, “I have a little Socrates in me.”
Intellectual humility, by the way, needn’t lead to nihilism. There is good and justice, but knowledge of these things is like a mathematical limit: If we keep trying, we can get closer to a perfect understanding, and theoretically, we can arrive, but, because we are human, we never do.
“But Teri, you’re wrong! The truth can fit onto a bumper sticker!”