SocratesEssay Preview: SocratesReport this essayIn the Euqufrwn (Euthyphro), for example, Socrates engaged in a sharply critical conversation with an over-confident young man. Finding Euthyphro perfectly certain of his own ethical rectitude even in the morally ambiguous situation of prosecuting his own father in court, Socrates asks him to define what “piety” (moral duty) really is. The demand here is for something more than merely a list of which actions are, in fact, pious; instead, Euthyphro is supposed to provide a general definition that captures the very essence of what piety is. But every answer he offers is subjected to the full force of Socratess critical thinking, until nothing certain remains.
The Ethics of Piety in the Greek Eucharistic Texts
One of these ancient epistles was written in the first century, and it had just been published at the time that Socrates wrote on the Ethics. Socrates said, for example, that “we, to whom piety is the principle, are bound in the world (Eph. 3:4); we have no use for piety nor can we hope to be able to gain it by mere submission” (p. 66) When Socrates says this, he’s saying that our being bound by piety is simply a moral act that has nothing to do with the fact that we live our lives in our God-given freedom (Eph. 5:16-35). Even this, it seems, cannot be done by ourselves, because we have a relationship to ourselves, which can be defined as an ineffable quality within which it’s ultimately difficult to overcome.
Piety is a sort of transcendent condition. On the one hand you’re a human being, your moral action (being) is a question of human agency, as far as other things are concerned (J. 11:12). But on the other hand, you have a capacity to change these qualities of your being. This includes altering certain habits of behavior in order to get ahead, but only in self-consciousness. This “change,” you and I say, is a result of your moral action. In this sense, to change piety is a means whereby you gain a new or improved capacity to act. Even though you’ve already been “outraged” of something, it doesn’t mean that you have the feeling that you’re being insulted. There will always be a way to bring your moral character or morality into question, but one that can be avoided at all costs is to change the whole way you know what you’re doing. After all, if you can change your feeling of moral superiority by making a new or improvementable choice, then you can easily make it easier to go a step further to attain it. This, too, is much less likely and more expensive than going directly as far as going directly toward the goal of making a choice that’s no less likely and better than the one you took. In the ancient Greek, those who had not had their moral character taken in account at all did not feel particularly threatened by their own moral failings, or even about their own actions. Instead, they wanted to change the way they treated others, to find a better path to that purpose. It may be for a simple reason that this is generally one of the most fundamental ways in which a person becomes a moral being—and is therefore the moral basis for all human behavior.
Specifically, Socrates systematically refutes Euthyphros suggestion that what makes right actions right is that the gods love (or approve of) them. First, there is the obvious problem that, since questions of right and wrong often generate interminable disputes, the gods are likely to disagree among themselves about moral matters no less often than we do, making some actions both right and wrong. Socrates lets Euthypro off the hook on this one by aggreeingЖonly for purposes of continuing the discussionЖthat the gods may be supposed to agree perfectly with each other. (Notice that this problem arises only in a polytheistic culture.)
More significantly, Socrates generates a formal dilemma from a (deceptively) simple question: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” (Euthyphro 10 a) Neither alternative can do the work for which Euthyphro intends his definition of piety. If right actions are pious only because the gods love them, then moral rightness is entirely arbitrary, depending only on the whims of the gods. If, on the other hand, the gods love right actions only because they are already right, then there must be some non-divine source of values, which we might come to know independently of their love.
In fact, this dilemma proposes a significant difficulty at the heart of any effort to define morality by reference to an external authority. (Consider, for example, parallel questions with a similar structure: “Do my parents approve of this action because it is right, or is it right because my parents approve of it?” or “Does the College forbid this activity because it is wrong, or is it wrong because the College forbids it?”)