Encyclopedia of Philosophy: THE EUTHYPHRO OF PLATO

« THE EUTHYPHRO OF PLATO After the trial portrayed in the Apology, there was a delay before sentence of death was carried out.

A sacred ship had set out on its annual ceremonial voyage to the i s l a n d o f D e l o s, a n d u n t i l i t r e t u r n e d t o A t h e n s t h e t a k i n g o f h u m an life was ta b o o .

P l a t o h a s re pres ente d t h e s e d a y s b etween conde m n a t i o n a n d e x ecutio n i n a pair of unforgettable dialogues, the Crito and the Phaedo.

No one knows how much in these dialogues is history, and how much invention; but the picture which they paint has fired the imagination of many who lived centuries and millennia after Socrates' death. Be fore consid ering these works, we should turn to a s h o r t d i a l o g u e , t h e Euthyphro, which Plato situates immediately before the trial.

However fictional in detail, this probably gives a fair picture of Socrates' actual methods of discussion and cross-examination. Socrates, awaiting trial outside the courthouse, meets young Euthyphro from Naxos, who has come to bring a private prosecution. Euthyphro's father had apprehended a farm-labourer who had killed a servant in a brawl; while sending to Athens for an authoritative ruling about his punishment, he had had him tied up and thrown into a ditch, where he died of hunger and exposure.

The son had now come to Athens to prosecute a charge of murder against his father. The case is obviously intended by Plato to be a difficult one: did the father really kill the labourer? If he did, is killing a murderer really murder? If it is, is a son a proper prosecutor of a father? But Euthyphro has no doubts, and regards his action as the performance of a religious duty.

The case provides the setting for a d i s c u s s i o n b e t w e e n S o c r a t e s and Euthyphro o n t h e r e l a t i o n b e t w e e n r e l i g i o n and morality.

The nature of piety, or holiness, is of keen interest to Socrates who is himself about to stand trial on a charge of impiety.

So he asks Euthyphro to tell him the nature of piety and impiety. Piety, replies Euthyphro, is doing as I am doing, prosecuting crime; and if you think I should not take my father to court, remember that the supreme god Zeus punished his own father, Cronos.

Socrates expresses some distaste for such stories of conflicts between the gods, and takes a while to ascertain that Euthyphro really believes them.

But his real difficulty with Euthyphro's account of piety or holiness is that it merely gives a single example, and does not tell us what is the standard by which actions are to be judged pious or impious.

Euthyphro obliges with a definition: holiness is what the gods love, and unholiness is what they hate. So crates points o ut that, give n the storie s a b out qua rre l s b e twe e n t h e g o d s, it may not be easy to secure a consensus about what the gods love; if something i s l o v e d b y s o m e g o d s a n d h a t e d b y o thers, it will turn out to b e b o th holy and unholy.

Such may be the case with Euthyphro's own action of prosecuting his father.

But let us waive this, and amend the definition so that it runs: what all the gods love is holy, and what all the gods hate is unholy.

A further question arises: do the gods love what is holy because it is holy, or is it holy because the gods love it? In order to get Euthyphro to grasp the sense of this question, Socrates offers a number of examples which turn on points of Greek grammar.

His point could be m a d e i n E n g l i s h b y s a y i n g t h a t i n a c r i m i n a l c a s e , ‘ t h e a ccuse d' is so calle d because someone accuses him; it is not that people accuse him because he is the accused.

Now is the holy, similarly, so called because the gods love it? Once he u n d e r s tand s t h e q uestion, Euthyp hro rejects it: on the contra ry, the god s love what is holy because it is holy. Socrates now slyly offers ‘godly' as an abbreviation for ‘what is loved by the gods'.

Since Euthyphro maintains that holiness and godliness are the same, we can substitute ‘godly' for ‘holy' in Euthyphro's thesis that what is holy is loved by the gods because it is holy.

We get this result: (A) The godly is loved by the gods because it is godly O n t h e other hand i t s e e m s clear that (B) T h e g o dly is god ly be c a u s e i t i s l o v e d by the god s since ‘godly' was introduced precisely as a synonym for ‘loved by the gods'.

Socrates claims to have reduced Euthyphro to inconsistency, and urges him to withdraw his claim that godliness and holiness are identical.. »