PLATO — EUTHYPHRO

Core Argument

The Euthyphro asks what piety is and, in failing to find a satisfactory answer, raises the question that has structured philosophy of religion ever since: is something holy because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is holy? If the former, piety is arbitrary, dependent entirely on divine preference with no independent standard; if the latter, there is a standard of holiness to which the gods themselves are accountable, independent of their will. Socrates demolishes Euthyphro's successive definitions without supplying one of his own.

Context

Set outside the court where Socrates is about to face the charges that will result in his execution, the dialogue is framed as an irony: Euthyphro, who claims expertise in piety, cannot define it, while Socrates, charged with impiety, is genuinely seeking the definition. The dilemma Socrates poses became central to medieval debates about divine command theory and natural law, and remains a standard problem in analytic philosophy of religion.

Lineage

Reader's Note

Short, accessible, and self-contained. The Grube translation (Hackett) is standard. Read it before The Republic and before Aquinas on natural law; the dilemma it poses runs through both.

Author

The Euthyphro is a short early dialogue set on the porch of the King Archon's court, where Socrates has come to face his indictment on charges of impiety. His interlocutor is Euthyphro, a self-described religious expert (mantis) who is at the same court to prosecute his own father for the death of a servant — an action he defends on the grounds that piety demands it regardless of family ties. Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) uses this dramatic situation — a man so certain of his knowledge of the pious that he will prosecute his own father — to set up the Socratic examination: if Euthyphro truly knows what piety is, he should be able to say. The dialogue's failure to arrive at a definition is deliberate: the Euthyphro is not a failed attempt to define piety but a demonstration that the most confident possessors of moral concepts are the least able to give an account of them. The dialogue was placed by ancient editors at the head of the tetralogy surrounding Socrates' trial and death (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo), establishing the question of piety as the frame within which his death is to be understood.

Historical Impact

The Euthyphro dilemma — is something pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious? — is the central problem of the philosophy of religion's account of the relationship between God and morality, and has been so since Plato posed it. It was reformulated in medieval theology as the voluntarism/intellectualism debate: Duns Scotus held that what is good is good because God wills it (voluntarism); Aquinas held that God wills what is good because it conforms to his own rational nature, which is identical with goodness itself (intellectualism). The dilemma rules out the simplest form of divine command theory — the view that moral obligations are simply whatever God commands — because the first horn makes morality arbitrary (God could command cruelty) and the second makes God redundant (morality is independent of God's will). Leibniz opens the Discourse on Metaphysics with this problem, and it remains the starting point for philosophical theology's engagement with ethics. In analytic philosophy of religion the dilemma has generated a large literature on modified divine command theory (Adams, Alston, Murphy) attempting to escape between its horns.

Reception History

In antiquity the dialogue was read as a contribution to the question of piety rather than to metaethics in the modern sense. Neoplatonist commentators (Proclus, Iamblichus) read the failure to define piety as pointing toward the ineffable character of the divine — the Good, like piety, exceeds definition. Medieval theological readers largely absorbed the dialogue's question into the voluntarism/intellectualism controversy without reading the Platonic text directly. The dialogue's modern philosophical significance was established by analytic philosophy's use of it as a logical puzzle: the dilemma has a clean formal structure (a dilemma with two unsatisfactory horns) that lends itself to the tools of philosophical logic. Contemporary scholarship has moved in two directions: one tradition focuses on the philosophical theology implications (divine command theory, natural law); another, associated with the study of the early Platonic dialogues, asks whether Socrates has a positive account of piety that he deliberately conceals, and whether the dialogue's aporia is genuine or theatrical.

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