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Euthyphro

By Plato

Plato's Euthyphro follows Socrates and a self-confident religious expert outside an Athenian court. As Euthyphro prepares to prosecute his father, Socrates asks him to define piety. Successive answers - pious action, what the gods love, service to the gods, and prayer and sacrifice - fail under examination. The dialogue raises the enduring question of whether divine approval creates moral rightness or responds to a standard that is already right.

Translator or editor
Benjamin Jowett
Publication
c. 390s BCE
Genre
Socratic dialogue; ethics; philosophy of religion
Era
Ancient Philosophy

About this work

Euthyphro is Plato's compact dialogue about piety, morality and religious authority. Socrates, awaiting prosecution for impiety, meets Euthyphro outside an Athenian court. Euthyphro is prosecuting his own father and claims a confidence in divine matters that makes him an ideal person for Socrates to question. Socrates asks for a definition of piety that applies to every pious action. Euthyphro first points to his own prosecution, then proposes that piety is what the gods love. The traditional gods disagree, however, so the same act might be loved and hated at once. When Euthyphro says piety is what all the gods love, Socrates asks whether the gods love pious things because they are pious, or whether those things become pious because the gods love them. The question distinguishes a moral quality from approval by an authority and became one of philosophy of religion's most influential problems. Further definitions describe piety as care of the gods, service to them, and knowledge of prayer and sacrifice. Each remains incomplete or returns to divine approval. Euthyphro eventually leaves without producing an adequate definition. The unfinished inquiry demonstrates Socrates' method: examples, inherited stories and confident assertions must be tested for consistency. The dialogue prepares for the Apology while asking how people can claim certainty about religious and moral duties they cannot clearly explain.

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