Before going through the dialogue, look at its conclusion (16a). Socrates
there claims very clearly that he does not know what piety is.
This is one of Socrates' famed "disavowals"
of knowledge. Socrates claims, namely, right at the end
of the dialogue not to know what virtue is. Dialogues that end in
puzzlement are called aporetic after the Greek
word for 'puzzle' or 'quandary.' The Greek word is also an English
word, aporia.
Euthyphro's First response
(piety is prosecuting a wrongdoer) identified too small a
part of piety. In other words, the answer had a scope problem:
it's scope was insufficient to answer the question (6d).
What Socrates wanted was one form that all piety shares, and that
nonpious things do not have. He wanted a criterion by which to
identify all pious things and only pious things (6d). The scope of such an
answer would fit the scope of piety perfectly.
Euthyphro's Second Response
(the pious is what god loves, 7a) was Formally correct:
it had the right scope and was universally applicable to piety,
but it was incoherent, because different gods love (and hate)
different things (7b).
Thus something could be loved by one god and hated by another,
which would make it pious and not pious (8a-b). That is only incoherent if we assume that
piety is not something that consists in the relationship between a
god and a thing or if we assume that it is true that some gods
love different things. In other words, it assumes that piety is
not like taste: there is nothing incoherent about saying that
something tastes both good and bad (OJ for instance tastes good to
most people, but not after brushing your teeth, and it always
tastes bad to some people). It also assumes there are gods, which
is problematic for some, whether because they are atheists or
monotheists or think the gods don't care about such things (or any
number of other ways that god(s) might not fit the claim "god
loves the pious").
Euthyphro's Emended response:
what all the gods love is pious (9d). Problem: piety
exists independently of whether gods love something or not (10a, 10e). The causal
direction is as follows: a thing's piousness causes it to be loved
by the gods. BUT the gods' love does NOT cause things to be pious.
That seems like a sensible claim, but consider the Old Testament:
why are the 10 commandments right? on a very plausible
interpretation of the OT, they are right because god said so.
There is no big worry about why god says so: god says so,
and so, because of that, they are to be obeyed. This has huge
implications for what sort of thing god(s) is.
That brings us to an important distinction:
Accident vs. essence (11a)
The essence of humanity is rationality and animality (at least on
one going definition of humanity). It is accidental that some
humans are dark or light-haired, that they weigh 100 or 200
pounds, that they know Tagalog, Malagasy, English, or Latin. The
dialogue suggests that Euthyphro identified an accident of piety
(that gods love it) rather than its essence. Socrates wanted its
essence.Importantly, this is a huge point for Platonic Forms and
also for the history of philosophy: this is the first theorization
of something like essence vs. accident, a powerful conceptual
analysis.
Socrates' attempt to show
Euthyphro how to answer (11e and following): The
discussion became circular after Socrates got Euthyphro to agree
that piety is a part of justice. But wait, an important
observation is that Socrates
thinks that Piety is a part of justice: that seems to be
an important moral claim which Socrates believes. Does he know it?
He says he does not know what piety is at the end of the dialogue,
so this claim is in tension with that claim.
Socrates agrees that piety is care of the gods at 12e:
note well that this is another claim that seems to be knowledge
about piety, but he does not know what sort of care one could
offer to a perfect thing that lacks nothing and needs nothing
(i.e. to a god). Care usually improves things, but the god(s)
cannot be improved.
It is important to note that this part of the dialogue is meta: it
talks about what is happening in the dialogue itself, what moves
the characters are making, and suggests ways to improve them.
Plato often goes meta. The toolchest of philosophy is being
created right before our eyes here.
At 14b, Euthyphro suggests
another answer: conventional religious actions such as
sacrifice, prayer, etc. are care of the gods, but their opposites
(whatever the opposite of prayer and sacrifice is: blasphemy and
sacrilege?) are impious. Socrates replies that Euthyphro had been
on the verge of giving him the kind of answer he wanted at that
point! What would that answer have been? And, importantly, is this
a clue left by Plato's Socrates that we can use to figure out an
answer? One suggestion is that we care for the gods by caring for
ourselves and increasing our own virtue.
The examination of Euthyphro's third answer reveals that piety is
a kind of equal exchange between humans and gods: we offer
sacrifice, honor, reverence, and prayer, and they do good things
for us. This definition not only reverts to the previous "the
pious is what the gods love" answer (15b), but also involves a sort of insult to gods.
The insult is that they might need something from us and so not be
perfect. It is a do ut des model of human-divine
interaction, a transactional model, and as such is a
non-starter for thoughtful deists.
Socrates believes that the sort
of things he asks about (what is piety, what is courage, what is
virtue, etc.) are knowable and explainable by humans.
Thus he must think that there is some chance that Euthyphro knows
and can explain piety. That chance is increased by the fact that
Euthyphro is prosecuting his father, because prosecuting one's
father is, prima facie, an impious act according to Athenian
beliefs.
Socrates thinks along the following lines: someone who claims to
be pious and yet prosecutes his or her father MUST know what piety
is. Thus action implies knowledge for Socrates.
Conversely, we will see that knowledge implies action (if
you know what is right, you cannot not do it). Note that these two
claims are not made directly and explicitly in the dialogue: they
are 'implicit' epistemological claims about virtue.
Given that Socrates thinks his questions are answerable by
humans, he is not disingenuous when he approaches people and takes
them at their word if they claim to know about piety, courage,
etc. He may well suspect that they are mistaken about their state
of knowledge, but he must
believe that there is a chance that they know.
Furthermore, if he is to have a chance at finding out what he
wants to know, what else should he do? it would be
counterproductive and unpleasant to challenge people by saying
that they don't know what piety or courage is right from the
start. It is much more pleasant to ask them to teach him. It is
pleasant and also that way they are more likely to trust him and
to be willing to talk with him.
Suggestion about the implicit assumptions behind what Socrates is
doing: Socrates makes some simple plausible assumptions: