Euthyphro was right (updated 2020-11-22)

Note: This blog post has been retracted, since I no longer think of it as a good representation of how I think about its topic. I may, or may not, have written a better post about the same topic since; check the full list of posts.

Another consequence, good or bad, of holding my opinion about justice is this: that I must say that Euthyphro was right. Not that he knew perfectly the true nature of piety, but that he gave a perfectly good definition of it, and that Socrates objected very poorly to it.

I do not mean the subterfuge regarding the pious being loved by the gods, but the definition he gave after some pressure: that piety is “that part of justice which attends to the gods, as there is the other part of justice which attends to men.” (12e) Given my opinion about justice, this would seem to be an adequate definition; at least, it picks out a virtue. It makes sense to divide justice according to the different counterparts of our rights and duties. Stated this way, it seems to me to be identical to what Thomas Aquinas called the virtue of religion.

But Socrates, taking the “attention” too literally, and in line with his own, wrong opinion about justice, decides that if this part of justice “attends” to the gods, it must make them better in some way, as when the huntsman attends to dogs, or the horseman attends to horses, or the physician attends to men.

As we know from the Gorgias, Socrates does think that justice, as a whole, is supposed to make men better, namely by healing the injustice in their souls; as a result, he can make no sense of piety, not as a part of justice at any rate. Not without admitting that our prayers and sacrifices improve the gods in some way, or our gifts supply their wants in some way; which would itself be impious.

Addendum (2020-11-22)

The above is probably not the best interpretation of Socrates. It has been pointed out to me that Socrates may more plausibly be read as having no problem with the definition, and actually accepting it.

In the text, he does accept it, but I took this to be provisional – the definition is then implied to be worthless after Euthyphro is unable to give something that the pious man assists the gods in producing. I saw this as something immediately absurd – the gods being helped seemed ridiculous.

But it is not really ridiculous that the gods be aided in the production of something. It is absurd that they be improved, or benefited, but not assisted, which Euthyphro clarifies is what he means by the “attention”. An alternative reading is that the reader was meant to see piety as something that assists the gods in producing virtue – that is, what Socrates had been doing, though Athens would never admit it. Or, at least, that piety does assist the gods in producing something, at any rate, and Euthyphro is shown to lack knowledge by not knowing what that is.

I saw the dialogue as being against the definition of piety as a part of justice, so that piety would have to be defined in some other way under the “physician theory” of justice. But it doesn’t have to.

And there is reason to think it wasn’t meant that way, in that the Definitions of Speusippus define piety as, well, “justice relating to the gods”. It would be strange that this definition became current in the Academy, and made its way into that work, if Plato had written a dialogue against it.