A short Socratic dialogue asking what makes an act pious, staged as Socrates waits to be tried for impiety.
The Euthyphro is a brief dialogue set outside the King Archon's court in Athens, where Socrates has just learned that Meletus has indicted him for corrupting the young and inventing new gods. There he meets Euthyphro, a self-assured religious expert who is himself prosecuting his own father for murder after a hired laborer died in his father's custody. Socrates, facing his own impiety charge, asks Euthyphro to define the holy, hoping to use the answer in his defense.
Euthyphro offers several definitions in turn -- that piety is doing what he is doing now (prosecuting wrongdoers regardless of kinship), that piety is what is dear to the gods, and finally that it is a kind of service or trade with the gods -- and each is dismantled by Socrates through cross-examination. The dialogue's most famous turn is the argument that if the pious is simply 'what the gods love,' this cannot explain why it is loved, since the gods themselves disagree about what is right; and the deeper question, still called the Euthyphro dilemma, asks whether something is holy because the gods love it, or the gods love it because it is holy. Euthyphro never produces a definition that survives scrutiny, and after his last answer -- that piety is a trade in which humans give gifts and gods give benefits -- collapses under Socrates's questioning, he abruptly excuses himself and leaves.
The dialogue matters less for any settled conclusion than for its method: Socrates uses a man who claims expert religious knowledge to show how unexamined confidence in inherited piety collapses once pressed for a consistent account. It leaves open, deliberately, the question it raises, and the 'Euthyphro dilemma' about the ground of moral value in divine will remains a live argument in philosophy of religion.
“Well, the Athenians don't exactly call it a "case," Euthyphro -- they call it an indictment.”
— Euthyphro · read this chapter →
“Murder, Socrates.”
— Euthyphro · read this chapter →
“Well then, what's dear to the gods is pious, and what's not dear to them is impious.”
— Euthyphro · read this chapter →
“Then the same things, it seems, are both hated and loved by the gods, and the same things would be both hateful to god and dear to god.”
— Euthyphro · read this chapter →
“is the pious loved by the gods because it's pious, or is it pious because it's loved?”
— Euthyphro · read this chapter →
It is a short Socratic dialogue in which Socrates, awaiting trial for impiety, questions a religious expert named Euthyphro about what piety actually is. Euthyphro offers several definitions, none of which survive Socrates's questioning, and the dialogue ends without a settled answer.
It is the question Socrates poses when Euthyphro says the pious is 'what is dear to the gods': is a thing holy because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is holy? The distinction matters because if love simply causes holiness, holiness has no independent ground, but if the gods love it for a prior reason, that reason -- not divine approval -- is what makes it holy.
Euthyphro is a self-described expert in religious matters who is prosecuting his own father for murder, after a hired laborer his father had bound in punishment died before the proper authorities could be consulted. Socrates meets him outside the King Archon's court, where Socrates is himself facing an indictment from Meletus.
No. Euthyphro proposes that piety is prosecuting wrongdoers, then that it is what is loved by the gods, then that it is a kind of trade of gifts and benefits between humans and gods; Socrates refutes each in turn, and Euthyphro leaves rather than continue.
He is facing Meletus's indictment for impiety and corrupting the young, and hopes that if Euthyphro -- who claims expert knowledge of the gods -- can define piety, Socrates can use that account to answer the charge and show he has not been improvising about divine matters.
After his final definition of piety as a trade between humans and gods collapses under questioning, Euthyphro suddenly says he is in a hurry and leaves, and Socrates is left without the definition he had hoped to bring to his trial.
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