Euthyphro

Not knowing where to start, I began at the beginning.  The Euthyphro is the first dialog in the Plato: Complete Works collection edited by John M. Cooper.  It takes place earlier on the same day that Socrates faced his famous trial for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens.  Basically, Euthyphro and Socrates bump into one another on the courthouse steps.  Socrates is there to defend himself, while Euthyphro is there accusing his father of murder.  

It's quite the dramatic setting actually, if you let it sink in a bit.  Euthyphro's father mistreated one of his servants, one who had killed another of his slaves, and the mistreatment led to his (the slaves') accidental, though avoidable, death.  Euthyphro is in court to accuse his father of murdering the murderer.  I think these days we would call it manslaughter.  The main point of the dramatic setup though is to establish that Euthyphro is someone who feels utterly confident in his moral judgements.  Despite trolley problem levels of sticky dilemma, he sees the situation as black and white -- his father was responsible for a death, and it doesn't matter what the circumstances of the victim or the rank or family relation of the assailant were, he must be accused of murder.  Euthyphro just knows that this is the pious (we would say moral) thing to do because he has a lot of experience with what the gods want.  Since he claims to possess this knowledge that other men lack, Socrates immediately asks that Euthyphro teach him how he too can know what is pious and what is impious.  That way, when they accuse Socrates of impiety, he can claim that, however much trouble he caused by asking questions in the past, he has now received expert guidance on the matter, and need never be impious out of ignorance again.

SOCRATES: Whereas, by Zeus, Euthyphro, you think that your knowledge of the divine, and of piety and impiety, is so accurate that, when those things happened as you say, you have no fear of having acted impiously in bringing your father to trial?
EUTHYPHRO: I should be of no use, Socrates, and Euthyphro would not be superior to the majority of men, if I did not have accurate knowledge of all such things.
SOCRATES: It is indeed most important, my admirable Euthyphro, that I should become your pupil, and as regards this indictment, challenge Mele- tus about these very things and say to him: that in the past too I considered knowledge about the divine to be most important, and that now that he says that I am guilty of improvising and innovating about the gods I have become your pupil. I would say to him: "If, Meletus, you agree that Euthyphro is wise in these matters, consider me, too, to have the right beliefs and do not bring me to trial. If you do not think so, then prosecute that teacher of mine, not me, for corrupting the older men, me and his own father, by teaching me and by exhorting and punishing him."

Obviously, the drama is not without a certain humor as well.  Because Socrates is about to lead the self confident Euthyphro in circles by asking him to define piety.  

1) First Euthyphro claims simply that what the gods like is pious, and what they don't like is impious.  

2) Socrates accepts this at face value, but then asks what happens if the various gods like different things.  Greek gods are constantly quarreling, and Socrates points out that they don't quarrel about simple things like how many or how big or how heavy, they only quarrel about the big important stuff like, "the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad".  

3) Euthyphro admits this, but responds that of course all the gods would like the fact that he's accusing his father of murder.

4) Whereupon Socrates says he should ask for a concrete sign that proves the gods really agree on this point.  But before he asks this, he wonders aloud what good the response will do him.  He will have learned what the gods think of Euthyphro's current lawsuit, but will he really have learned anything about what makes something pious in general?  So instead of bothering with the epistemological question of how would Euthyphro know, he proceeds to accept the new definition that what all the gods love is pious and what they all hate is impious.

5) Unfortunately for Euthyphro, this just leads to more problems.  Because now Socrates asks whether something is pious because the gods all like it, or whether the gods all like it because it is pious.  He points out that "god-loved" is a sort of performative adjective -- it just describes anything that the gods happen to love, and doesn't really tell you anything about that thing in itself.  By contrast, the pious, we suppose, is loved by the gods for some reason like its inherent piety.  In other words, "god-loved" and "pious" work differently as adjectives.  So when Euthyphro claims that the pious is the god-loved, he's not really telling us about the pious in itself, he's just telling us about one of its qualities.

I'm afraid, Euthyphro, that when you were asked what piety is, you did not wish to make its nature clear to me, but you told me an affect or quality of it, that the pious has the quality of being loved by all the gods, but you have not yet told me what the pious is.

6) Having again reached an impasse, Socrates changes directions, and asks whether what is pious is also just.  Predictably, given the circumstances, Euthyphro agrees that it is.  But Socrates points out that these two can't literally be the same thing, because they cover different amounts of area, so to speak -- what is pious is always just, but what is just may not always be pious.  No Venn diagrams are provided.  Socrates then proceeds to inquire exactly what part of the just is pious.

7) Euthyphro claims that it is the part of the just concerned with care for the gods.

8) Socrates goes on to clarify that there are at least two types of care, the type of care a horse breeder shows for horses, and the type of care a servant shows for his master.  Euthyphro clearly must mean that piety is the second type of care.  But then, if piety is caring for the gods in the sense of performing a service for them, then what service is it they want us to perform, and to what ends?

9) Of course, Euthyphro doesn't know what goal the gods have in mind in demanding piety, so he simply characterizes our side of the action.

EUTHYPHRO: I told you a short while ago, Socrates, that it is a considerable task to acquire any precise knowledge of these things, but, to put it simply, I say that if a man knows how to say and do what is pleasing to the gods at prayer and sacrifice, those are pious actions such as preserve both private houses and public affairs of state. The opposite of these pleasing actions are impious and overturn and destroy everything.

10) At which point Socrates thanks Euthyphro for finally offering a definition of piety -- knowing how to pray and sacrifice, to beg and to give, in a way pleasing to the gods.  He even terms it a sort of trading skill with the gods, we sacrifice stuff to them and get things we want in return.  But, wait, what do they get out of the deal?  Does our sacrifice actually benefit them in some specific way.

11)  Euthyphro responds that it's ridiculous to think we can benefit the gods.  It's just that our sacrifices please them.  So again, we've come full circle and have defined piety as something that pleases the gods.

I've summarized this at such length in order to set the stage for reflecting a bit on the form of the dialog, and on what Plato's philosophical point might be.  Because it's obvious that we've gotten nowhere on the supposedly central question of what is piety.  You could take this as Socrates knowingly slaughtering all his friend's sacred cows, with the ultimate intent of demonstrating that there is no such thing as piety.  That strikes me as the reading I might have had a sophomore though.  Now it seems to me that while there is some irony and humor in Socrates's questions, he is not just a pedantic non-believer who planned the whole trajectory in advance.  

The real interest lies elsewhere, precisely in the dialectical method that the dialog employs.  What's interesting here are the distinctions that Socrates introduces.  First, a distinction between the definition of piety, and some examples of it.  Second, with his bracketing of the question about discord amongst the gods, he distinguishes between what we know and how we know it, what we would call epistemology and ontology today.  Third, he goes on to distinguish between definitions with content and those without, or, equivalently, between what piety is and its attributes.  Finally, we have the distinction between types of care, which adds a nuance to the third distinction; if we knew why the gods were pleased by our actions, what benefits we provided, then perhaps we would be closing in on a true definition of piety.  The dialectic is this art of making distinctions to construct or define a problem.  I suspect we are going to see these same distinctions made many times in the course of other dialogs.

The other thing I found interesting here from a literary perspective is the way the style actually encapsulates another philosophical distinction, this time between authority and understanding.  The frame story tells us that Socrates is delighted to meet an expert on piety, and, having none of his own, would happily defer to this expertise.  But he insists on being able to understand exactly what the expert means, and is unwilling to accept it simply on the basis of his social authority.  In a sense, this is probably the most crucial distinction of all and why we consider Socrates the first philosopher.  He's not a sage or a guru, and he insists that no one else get to pose as one either.  So we've actually already implicitly met the crucial Socratic idea that no one may be able to possess the wisdom we are all in search of.