Philosophy in the Western tradition is vitally concerned with language. Words are a powerful instrument, whose use can be directed toward various ends. One end is persuasion. Arguments are used to induce belief in the audience. Socrates and Plato held that some beliefs are better than others: true belief is always the most desirable outcome of argumentation. Thus they clashed with the Sophists, who taught their students how to argue without concern for whether true belief is produced as a result. (The concept of true belief is itself a difficult one, with which Plato and philosophers to the present day have wrestled.)
The Euthyphro dialogue begins with a knowledge claim by Euthyphro, that he knows what it is to be pious. He claims this on the basis of his authority as a priest. Socrates rephrases the claim as being about what is common among all pious acts. Thus he was seeking a general or universal element.
Euthyphro failed to meet the demand for generality in his first attempt to describe what it is to be pious, i.e., to do what he is doing, prosecuting his father for murder. Socrates was concerned with all pious acts, so Euthyphro ventures that to be pious is to be pleasing to the gods, or, as he corrects himself, to all the gods. This seems to count for the common element in all pious acts, so one would think that Socrates would be satisfied. But he was not. He briefly raised the issue of how one can know that something is pleasing to the gods, but his main objection was more subtle.
Socrates asks a further question, a "why" question. Even if it is true that every pious act pleases all the gods, and everything that pleases the gods is pious, this does not fully explain the relation between the two. Is an act pious because it pleases the gods, or does it please the gods because it is pious? To answer this question, more is required than merely finding a common element. Euthyphro never expected this development and could not cope with it.
The thrust of the remainder of the dialogue is that being pleasing to the gods is not sufficient for an actÆs being pious. If the gods are pleased, it must be for a reason. Now the reason might be found in the effect that the pious act has on the gods. Perhaps it supplies some need the person has. Water is pleasing to someone thirsty because it satisfies the thirst. But the gods want for nothing. There is no ôinstrumentalö value in the pious acts. If they are to pleased by the pious act, it can only be because of the ôintrinsicö value of the act itself. (A value is intrinsic when it is wholly internal to the valued thing, and instrumental when it depends on a relation to some other thing.) PlatoÆs ultimate answer to the question of what makes a pious act pious is to say that there is a form, piety itself, by virtue of which a pious act is pious.
Another example might be helpful. An 18-year-old man is scheduled to be punished in Singapore by flogging, for his admitted guilt in vandalizing cars by spray-painting them. People have held that this is just punishment for his crime. Then, by SocratesÆ lights, they should be able to say what justice is. One answer, similar to EuthyphroÆs, is that just punishment is that which is approved of by the culture in the midst of which the punishable act occurs. Perhaps it would be too much to require that all the members of that culture approve it, but we may suppose an overwhelming majority do. But many people protest that somehow it is just wrong to inflict this kind of punishment for the manÆs crime. Socrates, it seems, would agree with the latter point of view, and would say that the justness of the punishment does not depend on who approves it, but rather on the intrinsic character of the act itself.
In the last class, we saw that Socrates was able to silence Euthyphro, who had claimed to know what piety is and that what is pious is what is pleasing to all the gods. What was wrong with what Euthyphro proposed? He apparently had found a common element in all pious acts, yet that was not enough.
The problem was that he had agreed to do too much. Socrates required that Euthyphro give an account of ôthe form itself that makesö a pious act pious. And being pleasing to gods is not what makes the act pious. Thus Socrates was demanding that there be an explanation of what makes acts pious rather than merely a description of some condition which holds when acts are pious.
Here is another example of the same kind of demand. People told Steven Spielberg that "SchindlerÆs List" would not be a successful movie. He could have replied that he knows what a successful movie is. If he were asked to say what it is that makes a movie successful, he would not satisfy the questioner by replying that it is great popularity that makes a successful movie successful. An adequate answer (the "secret" to success) would be one which describes some characteristic of movies in general, by virtue of which they are popular. This is the kind of answer Socrates was looking for.