▶︎ 0:00 We're beginning our examination of the history of western ethics where western ethics began, with Socrates in ancient Greece. There were a number of people, philosophers before Socrates, but he creates such a change in topic and method and approach, that they're all lumped together as now what we just call the pre-Socratics, the people who came before him, because he revolutionized the whole, well, just about everything really. We are all on a completely different path because of these weird conversations that he had.
▶︎ 0:40 He transformed western civilization, not through answers that he had, but through questions that he posed to his fellow citizens in Athens. He would go to the marketplace, the agora, the public area where people would gather and talk, and he would get these people who were considered experts in various topics, and he would corner them and start asking them these strange questions, the kind of questions that no one had ever asked before. No human being had ever posed questions like this before.
▶︎ 1:15 He would ask them, not specific technical issues, but highly abstract questions. So he would get, for instance, a general, and he would ask the general about the one value that organizes their entire vocation. He would ask the general, "What is courage?" Not, "How do we take a hill that's well-fortified with a greater force?" Not, "How do you mount cavalry into the field," but, "What is courage?" Or he would ask an artist, not, "What is the way to carve marble?" but, "What is beauty?" Or a judge, "What is justice?"
▶︎ 2:05 He would ask them these questions about a very abstract quality that was at the heart of their entire discipline, their entire vocation, the thing that they were supposed to be experts about. Because if anyone would know about these things, it would be them. And if they are experts in this field, Socrates reasoned, then surely they know what this quality is that structures the entire field. Surely, a general will know what courage is. Surely, an artist will know what beauty is. An artist's whole job is to create beautiful things. How can they create beautiful things unless they know what beauty is?
▶︎ 2:48 And what he found was that people could not really answer these questions. He would ask them this. They would give answers, and he would very politely, very kindly, very jovially rip their answers apart and show that there were fundamental problems with them. And the person would come up with a different answer. They'd say, "Oh, no, no, of course, that's not what I meant, Socrates. No, no, obviously that's not what I meant. What I meant really was this." They'd come up with a different definition, and Socrates would very politely show the problem with that, and it would go on for a little while.
▶︎ 3:22 Meanwhile, a crowd would gather, watching this usually fairly pompous stuffed shirt person being taken down a peg or two, and people would enjoy it, and the person did not enjoy it very much. The expert did not enjoy it very much, and he got a very difficult reputation. The young people loved him. They loved watching this. The experts didn't like him very much, and he ended up being executed on trumped-up charges. Among the young people who gathered around to watch these inquiries, these conversations,
▶︎ 3:58 There was a young man named Plato. Plato was a brilliant man. He wanted to be a playwright originally, but he became entranced with Socrates, as many other people did. He was an extraordinarily charismatic person. And Plato wrote down these dialogues.
▶︎ 4:18 Socrates, as far as we know, never wrote a word. But Plato, the reason why we have all these records is because Plato wrote these down. A few other people did too, but Plato wrote many, many more that we have, and much, much more sophisticated works. So sometimes they're called Platonic dialogues because Plato wrote them. Sometimes they're called Socratic dialogues because Socrates is the main character in almost all of them. Doesn't really matter what we call them.
▶︎ 4:46 And these dialogues, most scholars divide them into three phases. There are Plato's early dialogues, which we believe are fairly historically accurate. They really show what Socrates himself was actually like, what these conversations were roughly like. Then Plato himself came into his own as a philosopher, one of the greats of all time, and so in the middle dialogues, we think he started opening his own ideas and just putting them into the mouth of Socrates, and Socrates just becomes a character and starts saying things that the historical person never did. And the late ones are just strange.
▶︎ 5:22 We're going to be talking about an early dialogue here. So we're going to be talking about Socrates rather than Plato, as far as we can tell.
▶︎ 5:36 All of these early Socratic dialogues have a similar structure, and the one that we're going to look at is called the Euthyphro. They're named for what we call the interlocutor. That just means the person that he's talking with, his conversation partner. So the Euthyphro is named after the person he's speaking to, who is Euthyphro. And like all the interlocutors, Euthyphro is a self-proclaimed expert in something. In this case, Euthyphro believes himself an expert in piety.
▶︎ 6:11 Now piety means, technically, being an upright person, knowing how to deal with the gods, knowing the right things to do in relationship to the divinities. But Ancient Greece had a very different relationship to religion than the modern West does. Religion really permeated the society. There was no such thing as a separation of church and state. The religion was part of the state and the state was part of the religion, so you had religious obligations as a citizen.
▶︎ 6:47 Therefore, where they are, the setting, because Plato is a master writer. He's a master playwright, and the dialogues are not just collections of arguments. The vast majority of philosophical writings are just arguments. Here's a premise, here's a premise, here's a conclusion, here's a potential objection, I'm responding to it, and they go on like that. These are little plays. There's a setting, there are characters, and Plato inserts meaningfulness and significance wherever he can.
▶︎ 7:18 So the setting, the characters, the offhand remarks, the tangents they go on, all of these have meaning because anything that, no matter what the historical facts, whatever's in the dialogue, Plato chose to put it in there. He didn't have a recording device that recorded these. He's remembering them and making choices as to what to include and what not to include. So if it's in the dialogue, then we can examine it for significance for the topic.
▶︎ 7:46 In this case, he's speaking to Euthyphro, who is a self-proclaimed expert on religious matters, and the setting, where they are, is the King Archon's Court. The King Archon's Court is one of the nine courts in Athens, each one of which dealing with different topics, crimes of a different nature, and the King Archon's Court dealt with crimes of a religious nature. Because there was no separation of church and state, you could be brought up on charges for angering the gods.
▶︎ 8:14 The gods, if you know anything about Greek mythology, the gods get angry and they take out their wrath upon mortals. So, you have a civic responsibility to placate the gods, to keep them happy, to protect your city. This is not just an individual relationship between you and your god. This is a relationship that's mediated by your social responsibilities, and therefore, you can be brought up on charges for this. And one of the wonderful things that Plato's doing here with this setting is that Socrates is meeting Euthyphro here.
▶︎ 9:03 Euthyphro is coming here because he's bringing charges up against his father. But Socrates is there because he's being charged with something. He's being charged with corrupting the youth, making the weaker argument the stronger, and with creating new gods, not believing in the gods of the state. That third one is really the impious one.
▶︎ 9:28 And the trial that he's about to go into as soon as he finishes this conversation is the trial that's captured in the dialogue known as The Apology, at the end of which Socrates will be sentenced to death, one of the most famous moments in western literature. So, people reading this in Ancient Greece knew what happened to Socrates. He was a very famous person. This was a very unusual circumstance. They rarely executed people. And this moment in time and this place are charged with meaning.
▶︎ 10:10 So, although this conversation can seem relatively light in some ways, this is literally a matter of life and death for Socrates. Socrates is about to be sentenced to death for getting the matter that they were discussing, piety, wrong, according to his fellow Athenians. So, he cares about this very much, and the fact that this is incredibly significant is right there on the stage, so to speak, in the very presence, in their very presence at that place, at that time. So, that has to be a presence in the atmosphere as you read this dialogue at all times.
▶︎ 11:06 Euthyphro is there to prosecute his father for murder, and Socrates is shocked by this. Greece was a patriarchal society, meaning that reverence and obedience to one's father is an extremely, extremely important value. And the idea that one would bring up one's father on charges, charges for murder, which could end up with the execution of the father, in fact, was a shocking thing to do.
▶︎ 11:37 And Socrates immediately says, "Boy, if you do this, you must really know what piety is." "If you weren't absolutely sure about what you know, you wouldn't be doing such a shocking thing, such a momentous act that could end in results that would have such serious effects." To which Euthyphro responds, "Well, of course I know. I'm an expert in this." And Socrates is making two points when he says this. First of all, he's making one of his central claims, which is the importance of knowledge for virtue.
▶︎ 12:19 For Socrates, the most important thing there is in being a good person is knowing what the right thing to do is. This is why he's asking people about these qualities, these properties, justice and courage and so on. Because the only way that you could know what to do, the only way you can do the right thing, is if you know what the right thing to do is. The only way you can know what the right thing to do is if you know what rightness is, what is right. And that question, what is right, that's philosophy.
▶︎ 12:56 So for Socrates, philosophical inquiry, the philosophical examination of beliefs, which is what he's engaging in when he has these conversations with people, this is literally the most important thing there is. Because if you don't have your beliefs examined, if you don't know that you have the right ideas, then you don't know that you're taking the right actions. And if you don't even know that you've taken the right actions, then you could be doing terrible, terrible things. And that's the most important thing there is.
▶︎ 13:31 This was the major turn that Socrates introduced into philosophy. Before him, the pre-Socratics, they were interested in metaphysics. They were interested in basically the very, very beginning stirrings of science. What is the universe made of? How does it work? Why do things happen? Why do the physical forces happen the way they do?
▶︎ 13:50 Socrates wanted to understand why we act the way we do. Because for him, behaving like a good person, being a good person is vastly, vastly more important than knowing the impersonal forces of the universe. There's simply no comparison in which is more important. And he turned philosophy towards ethics. It still has metaphysics and science and so on, but he really introduced this whole dimension, which he considered the most important one. And for him, it's all about knowledge.
▶︎ 14:27 We have to know these things. The second thing that this does is it draws the interlocutor out. Socrates engages in what's known as Socratic irony, which means he acts like he believes the interlocutor's claims to knowledge. So Euthyphro says, "Of course I know what impiety is. I wouldn't be superior to everyone else if I didn't." All this arrogant stuff. And Socrates says, "Great, I'm so glad I found someone who knows this. I've been looking for this for so long. Please, please, please teach me. Please tell me."
▶︎ 15:01 And this gives the interlocutor the kind of confidence to then define it, to give the definition, and that's what begins the dialogue. And what we're going to see by the end is that engaging in this dialogue where they try to find the answers to the ethical questions is itself the single most ethical activity that Socrates can do. It is the inquiry that is the answer to the inquiry, as we'll come back to.
▶︎ 15:42 So by drawing Euthyphro out to talk about what is good and bad and what is right and wrong, he is making Euthyphro a better person by doing this. And, as we will see, being pious. But we have to wait for that. So now we have the setting.
▶︎ 16:07 And we have what is sometimes called the what is X question, where whatever the X is, whatever the abstract quality that the interlocutor's an expert in, Socrates has gotten that out on the table. In this case, it is what is piety? Euthyphro is the interlocutor. The setting is the King Archon's court, where they deal with crimes having to do with piety. And the question now is, what is piety? And Socrates has gotten Euthyphro to say he knows what it is and to agree to teach Socrates.
▶︎ 16:38 And then we have the body of the dialogue. The main part of it is definitions and objections, and this is where the interlocutor gives his definitions of the X, in this case piety, and Socrates refutes them. Socrates brings up objections to each one. And our job as we read through it is to find each definition and find the refutation to it and understand what the objection is to it and how the next definition solves that problem, but then is open to a new problem. And that's the main part of the dialogue.
▶︎ 17:16 So we're going to go through this. There are four definitions in the Euthyphro, and we're going to look at each one with varying degrees of time, and explore all their refutations.
▶︎ 17:28 The first definition is almost always the same in the early dialogues. Socrates says, "What is piety?" And Euthyphro says, "Well, what I'm doing, prosecuting my father for wrongdoing." This is almost always the interlocutor's first answer, and it almost always has the same objection.
▶︎ 17:49 Socrates doesn't say, "That's wrong." He's very, very careful in the way he treats the interlocutor, because he knows the interlocutors are gonna run off if they get too offended or too upset. So he doesn't say it's wrong. What he says is, "It has the wrong structure." It's not that it's the wrong definition of piety, it's that it doesn't even come up to the level where it can be wrong, because it's not a definition. It's an example.
▶︎ 18:23 Euthyphro is giving a single act of impiety. This action, right here, that I'm doing, prosecuting my father when he's done something wrong, that's piety. Well, no. That is potentially, we're refraining from judgment at this point, but that is potentially a pious action. It might be, it might not be. We're not taking a position on that.
▶︎ 18:46 But regardless, even if it is a pious action, it isn't piety. It isn't the definition of piety. And so the accuracy of it really doesn't even matter in a sense, because it has the wrong structure. And what we're gonna see as we go through this is that this structure of the right kind of answer is the largest gain, the largest lesson that Socrates gives. But there's a very interesting moment here, a very important moment.
▶︎ 19:24 Because Euthyphro cites evidence for his claim. His claim is, "What I'm doing now, prosecuting my father, is pious." And his evidence is, as an expert, "I know I'm right because Zeus killed his father." So here is his expertise. Here is the knowledge that is underlying his claim, because Socrates says, "If you're taking this extreme action, this very surprising action, you must have really, really good evidence that it's right. You must have some really substantive information that's justifying your action or else you wouldn't do it."
▶︎ 20:07 And here is Euthyphro's justification. Here is the expertise that he's drawing on: myths. "Here are these stories. Zeus killed his dad, so it's okay for me to be endangering my father's life when I think it's right." And Socrates expresses doubt. Socrates says, "Really? You believe all those stories? You really think those are true?" And this is the moment where we see one of the reasons why Socrates is about to be sentenced to death. Because he's skeptical.
▶︎ 20:51 Here are the sacred stories of the gods. Here are their scriptures, to some degree. The things, the stories, the ideas that have been passed down about what the gods do, what the gods are like. Euthyphro takes them implicitly, takes them at surface value. "This is what happened. This is how we justify our actions. This is how we decide what we should be doing." Socrates doesn't do that. Socrates says, "I want to take those stories, and I'm not going to just believe them. I'm not going to just put my faith in them. I'm going to question them. I'm going to examine them."
▶︎ 21:40 He doesn't just reject them outright. What he does is he applies reason to them. He's a very religious man. He believes deeply in the gods. But if we're talking about the gods, what we have to be talking about are beings vastly superior to us. What we see in the myths, if you read The Iliad and The Odyssey and all these stories, we find gods, the gods are petty. They're silly. They're angry. They're horny. They get angry at each other. They play out these games with each other, with mortals as pawns. They're cruel. They're capricious.
▶︎ 22:28 But they're powerful. They are superior in that they run faster, they fly, they have lightning bolts. They're basically ancient Greek superheroes. So they're superior but in superficial ways. They're superior in physical strength and power. But they're not superior in character. They're just like us. They have all of our flaws. Socrates thinks if there are to be gods, they must be superior, but they must be superior in the superior ways. They must be better than us in the best ways, and that means they must have better characters. Make better choices. Be better. Not just be more powerful, but not be petty, not be cruel.
▶︎ 23:26 And so there's a deep irony here that's not mentioned, but just in passing, that Euthyphro, who is proclaiming his expertise in piety, is basing that expertise on beliefs that actually show the gods to be terrible, which means he's being impious. His beliefs actually are insulting to the gods. All those stories show the gods to be pretty lousy, which is very disrespectful. So his piety, in subscribing unquestioningly to the myths, to the sacred writings, is much more impious, Socrates would say, than Socrates' skepticism.
▶︎ 24:15 Socrates is skeptical towards those stories precisely because of his piety, precisely because he believes the gods must be much better than us. They would not do those horrible things. And Socrates is the one who's going up on trial for impiety. So this moment when Socrates is applying reason to myth, thinking through religious matters rather than simply accepting an authority, is a momentous event in Western civilization, and he was martyred for it, as he won't be the last.
▶︎ 24:56 But regardless, the refutation, and Plato plants all this with the gods, it's gonna come back in a minute, but the refutation is that this first definition is not a definition. It's an example. What Socrates wants here is a definition, and he explains basically what he wants from this, and he uses the term a form.
▶︎ 25:35 Now, this word got taken up by Plato, and its meaning changed dramatically. So a platonic form has a huge amount of metaphysical weight to it, has all these other meanings to it. But Socrates, in the early dialogues, he uses this in a different sense.
▶︎ 25:59 And in this dialogue, he explains what he means because a form is what he's looking for. A form is what would satisfy the what is X question. And he doesn't give this explicitly. We have to dig it out, but he gives three requirements for a form. There are three features that a satisfactory form will have. And the first one comes directly out of this. It has to be universal.
▶︎ 26:38 This is why an example won't work. An example is particular. An example is about one specific event, one specific thing, and therefore, it is very, very limited in its application. A form, piety rather than a pious action, piety, piousness will be a broad general quality. This is why these are abstract qualities. There are red things, red roses, red firetrucks, red stop signs, but those are very different from redness, from the color red. And to be a form, we need the color red, not just one example of red, a red object, or even a whole bunch of them.
▶︎ 27:24 And philosophers, of course, are always mocked for having head in the clouds, being too abstract. There was a play, in fact, at the time, by Aristophanes that literally had Socrates' head in the clouds, that he went drifting off into the air. And one of the reasons why he had this reputation was because he wanted an abstract quality. He didn't want concrete things, he wanted abstract quality. But what's interesting is that he didn't want the abstract quality, piousness instead of pious actions, he didn't want it because of abstraction. He wanted it for practical purposes.
▶︎ 28:08 So think about it for a minute. If we stick with Euthyphro's example, if we accept his example, what is piety? Prosecuting one's father when he does wrong, when he does wrong. Great. Well, why am I asking this question at all? Why do I want to know about piety? I want to know about piety so that I can act piously.
▶︎ 28:37 The purpose of the knowledge of ethics is not simple idle curiosity, to satisfy certain idle curiosity. It's not so that we can have debates. It's so that we can be ethical. The goal is completely concrete. What's interesting is the only way to achieve that goal is through abstract answers because the completely concrete answer, what I'm doing now, this specific action is only helpful if I'm in that specific situation.
▶︎ 29:14 If my father murders someone, then I know what to do. Then I know how to act piously. I prosecute him in King Archon's court. Every other situation I'm in, it's useless. I can't know how to act. It gives me no guidance.
▶︎ 29:34 So the only way that it can actually help me behave is if it gets abstracted from any specific particular situation, and if there, now it'll now enable you to apply it to lots of situations that I may find myself in. The abstractness is what enables it to be applied concretely. Total concreteness limits it. That means I can't apply it because it's wholly impractical. The abstract is what makes it practical.
▶︎ 30:15 If I know that redness is just a rose, I can't recognize any other red object, but if I know redness, then I can recognize in the stop sign, in the firetruck, and all around. So I need the abstract quality in order to use it, for it to be useful, for it to be practical. The abstractness isn't for its own sake. It's for concrete practicality, for utility.
▶︎ 30:41 And that's the second feature. The point of these answers is to guide our actions, is to tell us what to do. We want to be good, not just to know goodness. We want to know goodness in order to be good, so it has to be able to tell us what to do. And the only way that it can tell us what to do in many actions is if it is universal, if it is abstracted from any single particular circumstance, because otherwise it's limited to only that circumstance.
▶︎ 31:25 So Euthyphro's answer is utterly useless. That's the problem with it. It's intellectually incorrect because it isn't the quality, but it's practically useless. It doesn't help me be a better person, and that's what Socrates wants. He wants knowledge that we can use.
▶︎ 31:48 So it's the exact opposite of the stereotype of the philosopher who doesn't care about real life and only wants ideas. The reason why we want ideas is because of real life.
▶︎ 32:04 And the third quality is that it has to tell us the essence of the quality, whatever we're talking about, piety, courage, whatever. It's not enough just to tell us even a whole bunch of pious actions. It's got to get us to the heart of what piety is. It's got to define it. It can't just give us properties that it happens to have, what philosophers call accidents. It can't just have a property that it does possess. It's got to have a property that is what makes it pious, the thing that defines it as pious, because only then can we truly understand it. Only then will we genuinely know how to apply it in lots of situations and therefore know what to do.
▶︎ 33:02 So all three of these are interrelated. These aren't just a list. They all are integrated into the single part of what will allow us to be better people. And this is what Socrates is trying to communicate to Euthyphro.
▶︎ 33:22 This is meta-philosophy. Meta-philosophy is philosophizing about philosophy. It's talking about what philosophy has to be like. So this is meta-ethics. Socrates doesn't give us a whole lot of ethics. He doesn't give us a whole lot of rules and specifics and things to do, but he does talk a lot about what ethics must be like.
▶︎ 33:55 And one of the greatest things we learn from this dialogue is what an ethical answer must be like. Socrates doesn't really give us an ethical answer, nor does Euthyphro. But he does teach us what ethical answers must be like, which is what will enable us to go look for them on our own. So we don't depend on Socrates to tell us anything. We learn from Socrates how to think for ourselves.
▶︎ 34:29 And what we will see throughout this course is that the next three philosophers we look at, the three ethicists, Mill, Kant, and Aristotle, all in different ways, to differing extents, all accept Socrates' meta-ethical lesson. All three of these philosophers accept the idea that we need forms. They all accept the idea that the answer to ethics, the only way to satisfactorily bring an ethical inquiry to a conclusion is to have a theory that satisfies these three qualities. They learn the lesson that Socrates is teaching Euthyphro. Euthyphro's only gonna learn that well, but they learn the lesson.
▶︎ 35:19 And all three of these philosophers, we're going to see, give us their candidate for a form, the form of goodness, the form of ethics. And each one of them will satisfy the three properties. So they have all absorbed Socrates' meta-ethical lesson, and they will each give a different content to the form, but they all have the same structure. They all agree with that. They all agree on the structure and the form. They simply disagree with the content.
▶︎ 36:02 But the reason why we have ethics, the reason why there is this discipline at all, the reason why Mill, Kant, and Aristotle are able to talk to each other is because Socrates set up the game in the beginning. Socrates put out the board and the pieces and the rules, and they're all playing the game. That's why he's so important. He set up the rules, and these are the rules. Once you understand that this is what is needed, then when you read an ethicist, you will see, and I will show you, how they are responding to these demands, how each one of the three ethical theories we look at will respond to each three of these requirements.