▶︎ 0:01 We've had our first attempt at a definition, and our first, what I'm doing now, prosecuting my father, and our first refutation, which is, that's not a definition of piety. That's just an example. What happens now is, the interlocutor reformulates. The interlocutor comes back because they're still very, very confident in their knowledge, and they have to prove that they really are the expert, and they come back with a better definition.
▶︎ 0:27 Euthyphro's second definition now is that piety is what is dear to the gods, what the gods like, what the gods love. And Socrates is really happy about this. He says, "Oh, that's great. That's great." Well, we have to examine and look at it, but he says, "This is the right kind of answer because now, it's a definition." Now, it is universal because it's not just one thing. It is whatever is dear to the gods, not just one action. We can apply this to any situation, and it's action guiding because whatever the, all I have to do is figure out in any situation what is it that the gods love and do that, and then I'll be pious.
▶︎ 1:20 So, the first definition was useless. Unless I'm in that exact situation, my father murders someone, I don't know what to do. Now, I have an actual form. I have a definition that could help guide me and become, to become pious. So, this is a huge step. This is a major advance in ethics that we now have the right type of answer. We don't know if it's the right answer yet, he says. It's not going to be. I'm just, spoiler. But we have the right kind of answer.
▶︎ 2:02 What is happening here? The big spoiler, I'll give it right away, they don't find the answer. They never do. These early ones end in what's called aporia, which means puzzlement. They don't come to conclusions. None of these are with the... That's one of the big differences between the early dialogues and the middle and late dialogues. They don't come to an answer.
▶︎ 2:21 And a lot of people, when they first start reading these, they feel very frustrated, very disappointed. "Well, what the hell was the point of that? We never learned what piety was. Why did I go through all that stuff?" But we learn a lot along the way. One of the more interesting metaphilosophical lessons is, you don't need to get an answer to learn from questioning.
▶︎ 2:48 And just already here, from the step from the first to the second definition is a giant leap in sophistication. Instead of talking about just me, what I do is ethical, we're talking about what anyone would do. Instead of just talking about my specific action in this specific situation, we are now talking in generalities. And as I said before, that's not... Although that's an increase in abstraction, the point of the abstraction is for the concrete application to real life. So now, we are actually doing ethics in a way that's productive and useful. Very important change.
▶︎ 3:32 And Euthyphro has learned something massive. Whether he knows it or not, whether he'll remember or not, that's another question, but he has learned something. There's massive progress here.
▶︎ 3:41 But Socrates is going to have an objection. And here, we see what I mentioned before that this discussion of myths is coming back now. What Euthyphro had pointed to as his expertise, what Euthyphro pointed to as the justification for his action, for why his action of prosecuting his father was pious, was the myths that come down about Zeus killing his father and about all the stories of the wars between the gods, because this is what fuels all the Iliad and the Odyssey and all these myths. And it was very natural for Euthyphro to be talking about this. This is the knowledge he must draw upon to know what the gods like, is all we have.
▶︎ 4:37 But Socrates points out, "Now, hold on a second. These stories are all conflict. These stories are about Zeus getting angry or Athena getting angry with Poseidon." And that was one of the big plot lines of the Odyssey, was Odysseus trying to get home, but he couldn't get home because Athena wanted to help him and Poseidon wanted to delay it. So here, they're fighting. Poseidon and Athena, two gods fighting. Well, if two gods are fighting, then what is dear to the gods? Is Odysseus getting home dear to the gods? Well, it's dear to Athena. She wants it, but it's not dear to Poseidon. He's trying to stop it. So, is it dear to them or not? Well, yes and no. And yes and no means a contradiction.
▶︎ 5:28 A contradiction is what philosophers try to avoid. That means that you've gotten into a problematic situation, but that's a logical point. We're talking about doing ethics in order to be good, in order to be better for action guiding. And think about a contradiction here. Let's say that Odysseus comes to your door, and Odysseus says, "Please, you gotta help me get home." And you think, "Well, I wanna do the pious thing." Is helping Odysseus get home pious? Well, let me look at the form that I've been given. What is the definition I've been given? Piety is what's dear to the gods. Then is helping Odysseus get home dear to the gods? Well, it's dear to Athena, but it's not dear to Poseidon. It's loved by one, hated by the other, which means it's pious and it's impious.
▶︎ 6:33 And the problem now is, do I do it? This isn't an intellectual problem. This isn't just, "Gee, how do I think about it?" What do I do? Do I help Odysseus or not? And there's no answer, because I need to help him to be dear to Athena. I need to not help him to be dear to Poseidon. So the reason why a contradiction is a problem in this situation for ethics is that it prevents a clear guidance in my activity. It does not issue any instructions, which means the problem here is with number two. I don't know what to do in situations where there's a conflict.
▶︎ 7:33 And all the stories are about conflict, even the specific one that Euthyphro is pointing to, Zeus killing his dad. So therefore, when I, Euthyphro, prosecute my father, Zeus would love it. Yeah, but his dad wouldn't. So even there, it is the very action that he's doing and the very evidence that Euthyphro is citing, it doesn't work. Right there, there's a contradiction. So that action of what Euthyphro is doing is both pious and impious by his own definition, loved by some gods, hated by others.
▶︎ 8:12 And this is the beauty of the dialogue, in that what comes up early and seems very organic, very natural, just part of the conversation, actually was planted there for a very specific reason, to show this point. That even where Euthyphro was trying to justify himself, by the definition that he chooses, that makes it fail. He cannot justify himself by the very evidence he is citing as his expertise with the definition that he uses.
▶︎ 8:49 So the second definition is better than the first, because it's a definition at all, because it's got the right structure. It's got the right form. It is a form. It is universal. It can apply to lots of things. It is, at least potentially, action guiding. It just turns out, because of the stories that Euthyphro draws on, it can't guide actions. It runs into contradictions, and contradictions frustrate the issuance of clear, unambiguous actions. So, it doesn't work.
▶︎ 9:30 Now, at this point in the dialogue, Euthyphro is starting to see the pattern, that anything he says, Socrates is going to rip apart. So he starts checking out a little bit, and Socrates has to help him out here. Let's think about this logically. The problem with the second definition is that there's conflict among the gods. When there's conflict, that's when it cannot guide actions. Because then some of the gods love it, some of the gods hate it, and it's both pious and impious, and we don't know whether to do it or not.
▶︎ 10:11 So, how do we fix that? How can we make a definition that will be improved such that it avoids the problem of the second objection, the second refutation? Well, if the problem is the conflict among the gods, get rid of the conflict. So the third definition is, piety is what all the gods love. Basically he's saying, when some of the gods love something and some of the gods hate something, we get a contradiction and we don't know what to do. So let's put all those aside, and let's just focus on the unproblematic cases when there's unanimity, when all the gods agree.
▶︎ 11:03 All the gods love some things. All the gods hate some things. Those are going to be pious and impious. And we overcome the problem we had with the second definition. Now, the second definition improved on the first one simply by being a definition at all. But the third definition is a much more subtle and sophisticated and targeted improvement.
▶︎ 11:37 It locates the very specific area of problem, and it fixes that. And what Socrates is doing here is he's training Euthyphro in how to think critically. We're not just throwing answers around. We're not saying, "Well, maybe this, maybe that, maybe the other." We are focused on one particular line of thought, what the gods love, and we are tinkering with it. We are improving it. We're sticking with this one idea, and we're exploring it.
▶︎ 12:16 This is the birth of critical thinking. Socrates is showing Euthyphro this brand-new activity. Not just going with what your society does, not just doing what your friends and family do, not just believing stories. Thinking in a very sophisticated way. It is the very beginning, and yet it's already extremely sophisticated, because we're examining the specific problems and thinking of ways that fix those instead of just tossing it out and getting something different.
▶︎ 12:57 We are improving, and that's what the whole history of philosophy is gonna be. The entire history of philosophy, as we're gonna see, is just like a gigantic dialogue between the philosophers of definitions and objections, where one philosopher will have their definition and the next philosopher will have an objection to that and show how their answer is better, how their answer addresses that objection. And the next person will have an objection to that, and we just get better, we improve, we fix problems. This is how we learn together.
▶︎ 13:36 This is another reason why the Socratic dialogues are so formative, so influential, so seminal. We all come out of this. All of Western thinking is a form of Socratic dialogue across millennia, as we all together try to critique each other's ideas and improve them.
▶︎ 14:03 The specific way that Socrates and Euthyphro are improving this definition, the third definition from the second, is really crucial, because it's targeted. It's specific. It zeroes in on the problem and it fixes that problem. The problem was the conflict between what the gods love, and so it gets to the unanimous areas where they all love the same thing.
▶︎ 14:33 And now we have a better definition. It's a definition that will guide actions. It doesn't run into contradictions. It can't, because we're only talking about the times where they don't disagree. We're only talking about the times of agreement, and therefore we can't run into conflict, we can't run into contradiction, and we can't run into the problem of the second definition. So we've improved. We've learned. We've gotten better.
▶︎ 15:07 But there's a problem, of course. And the objection that Socrates raises to the third definition is the most famous and the most difficult part of this dialogue. And I gotta say, Plato really fell down here. He does not explain this well at all.
▶︎ 15:33 So our definition now, definition number three, is that piety is what all the gods love and impiety is what they all hate. And Socrates asks, "Okay, let's just take that for granted, but here's the question. Are pious things pious because the gods love them, or do the gods love them because they're pious?" That shouldn't make a lot of sense to you. If that's really confusing, it's not because you're dumb. It's because it's confusing.
▶︎ 16:11 So we have to work our way through this carefully. There are two different possibilities: piety is pious because the gods love it, or the gods love it because it's pious. And we have to understand what each of these options is and what the difference between them is and what the implications of them are, because the implications are very, very important.
▶︎ 16:35 What Socrates is talking about here is value. He's talking about two fundamentally different kinds of value, two different ways that things can have value.
▶︎ 16:53 And we can see this with an apple and a dollar bill. Now, you can go into a store and you can hand over this green rectangle of paper and get stuff for it, good stuff, nice stuff, cool stuff, things that are fun, things that'll feed you, things that are useful, just from a piece of paper that's not terribly useful or terribly important. Why? Why do they take this piece of paper to give you stuff for it? Well, because they believe that in turn they'll be able to hand it over to other people who will give them goods and services for it, and they in turn do the same thing.
▶︎ 17:35 The entire chain of the economy rests on belief, on faith that everyone believes it has value, and therefore it does. It has value only because and only if we believe it has value. If everyone stopped believing that it had value, it would lose all its value. And we know this because it happened. This happened in 1865 with Confederate money. In 1864, you could spend Confederate money in the American South, and it had value. You could trade it for goods and services.
▶︎ 18:13 In 1866, you couldn't, because the Civil War was over, the South lost, the government that backed it up was dissolved, and the same paper lost its value. Physically, it was the same. There weren't value molecules in it that disappeared. But because our beliefs about it changed, because our attitudes and our actions changed, its value changed. Its value disappeared.
▶︎ 18:38 Then many, many years later, it regained value as antiques, as collector's items. Why? Because we believed it had value again, a very different kind of value now, collectors instead of currency. But it was because of our belief change that its value changed in both cases. It never physically altered, but our views about it changed. The value of currency is like Tinker Bell. If you stop believing in it, it dies. But if you have faith, then it's real. The value of this dollar is as real as many, many other things. I can go buy things with it. But it only comes from our beliefs.
▶︎ 19:25 On the other hand, an apple has value in itself. This can sustain life, it can keep doctors away, apparently, from what I hear. It's got seeds in it that you can then make new apple trees. It can make new apples. It has objective properties inside of it that even if I don't believe in it, even if all of America gets together and votes and has the Apple Restriction Act, says, "Apples no longer have value. Apples no longer can nourish humans," that wouldn't change a thing. It still would.
▶︎ 20:04 We can change the value of the currency by voting it, because that's up to us. We are the source of it. We can't do a thing about the nutritional value of the apple because that's objective. This value is inside the object. This value comes from us as the subject. This is subjective. This is objective.
▶︎ 20:26 In other words, this has value because we value it, because we think it has value. We value it, and because we value it, therefore it has value. If we stop valuing it, like with Confederate money, it loses its value. But we value the apple because it has value. We create this value. We discover and recognize this value. This is subjective. This is objective. This is constructed. This is discovered. Very, very different types of value, even though they both have value.
▶︎ 21:12 Now, what Socrates is asking is, is piety and goodness in general like the dollar or like the apple? Do the gods love piety because it's pious? We recognize the apple to have value because it has value. We value it because it has value. Or, is piety pious because the gods value it? Does the dollar bill have value because we value it?
▶︎ 21:49 Do the gods create piety by loving it? Or, is there something about these pious actions that they see, they recognize, and that is what they love? That's the question. Is it objective or subjective? Do they create it or do they see it? And this has enormous implications.
▶︎ 22:17 To think about this for a minute, let's think about the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha.
▶︎ 22:27 It's the most remote human inhabited area on the planet. It is 1,732 miles off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. It's tiny. It has a diameter of 6.8 miles, and it has 250 permanent residents. In 1985, a cargo ship arrived with two special shipments.
▶︎ 22:57 The first shipment was the second car to arrive on the island. Now, the second car is very important. It's important in a very different way than the first car because only with the second car can you have a car accident. Only with a second car do you need traffic laws. If you have one car, it can drive wherever it wants. But with two cars, now you need laws to calibrate, to rule over how they can interact.
▶︎ 23:31 For instance, you need to decide which side of the road is the correct one to drive on. And in this case, I do mean which side of the road, 'cause they have a single road on the island. So, should they drive on the left side of the road or the right side of the road? Some countries drive on the right side of the road, like America. Some countries drive on the left side of the road, like England. Which way would you go? What would you vote on and why?
▶︎ 24:02 The problem is they seem equally good. Left side, right side. You can pick either one. See, it's arbitrary. Whichever one you pick. You could pick the other one. It's perfectly meaningless. And which means you can choose either one. And that makes the decision perfectly easy, but also perfectly difficult. Because which one are you gonna choose? You have no reason to pick one over the other. The decision is completely arbitrary, with nothing to sway you in one direction or the other.
▶︎ 24:45 Luckily, the second object that came was a proclamation from Her Majesty, the Queen of England, saying you're gonna drive on the left side of the road. So they didn't have to make the decision. But after that proclamation was read, there's an answer. After that's read, the left side of the road is the correct side of the road to drive on Tristan da Cunha. Before that, there was no answer. If you wanna say which was the correct side, there simply was no correct answer.
▶︎ 25:19 There was no truth, there was no fact, because the correct side of the road is created. It is something that a society makes. There's no objective fact in the soil, in the asphalt, in the tire rubber about which side is correct. When the Queen said, "The left side shall be the right, shall be the correct side," if someone in the crowd said, "Well, is that, is she right? Is she correct about that?" That question makes no sense. There's nothing to be correct about.
▶︎ 25:54 Before she decided it, there was no fact. There was only a fact after she decided it. And so the correctness of her decision, the accuracy of it, the goodness of it, the justice of it is meaningless. Once she's decided, then you can be correct if you drive on the left side, and you can be wrong if you drive on the right side. But only once it has been determined. The decision itself is fundamentally arbitrary. The question of correctness cannot apply to it.
▶︎ 26:35 Same thing with currency. Is the dollar, is a dollar the right amount? That makes no sense. It's whatever it is. And here's the point. It's whatever it is. Is America wrong for deciding the right side? No, we can drive on the right side.
▶︎ 26:53 And here's the point. If ethics is like the dollar bill, if piety is pious because the gods love it, well, they could've loved something else. The Queen could have, perversely, made the right side of the road the correct one. That would've been just as right, and then that would've been the right one. If ethics is created, then it can be created any way the creator wants. Whether the creator is God or the creator's a society, the creator's laws, the creator's history, whatever you want, there's no truth. There's no fact. There's no objective reality behind it. It is only what we deem it to be.
▶︎ 27:54 There's no fact about what order the alphabet should be in. If we wanted the alphabet to begin with W, we could. And it would feel weird to us only because we're used to it beginning with A. If we were used to it beginning with W, we'd find it beginning with A weird. So if the gods create ethics, then the gods could have made giving to charity evil, and kicking puppies good. They could make it any way they want, just like we could make the side of the road any way we want.
▶︎ 28:32 And you might think, "Well, they would never do something like that, that's horrible." Well, it's only horrible after they have made kicking puppies good, excuse me, kicking puppies bad and giving charity good. So to us, that would be horrible, because we live in the universe where kicking puppies is bad and giving charity's good. But according to this way of thinking, if it's created, then if they had created kicking puppies to be good, we'd be horrified in ethics that made it bad. And there'd be no right or no wrong.
▶︎ 29:12 So if one believes, and many people do believe, that God creates ethics, God decides ethics, that good and bad come from God's decision, that means that there was nothing about good and bad before God made that decision. That means that God creates it. It originates there. There's nothing before that. So there's nothing that it corresponds to. There's nothing it captures. There's nothing it's accurate to. It can be any way God wanted it to be.
▶︎ 29:47 And whatever God decided it to be, that would be what ethics is. God could've made murder ethically right, and that just would be what it is. Just like we could've made the right side of the road the correct side for, in Tristan da Cunha. On this view, what's sometimes called divine command theory, because it's God's command that makes ethics, ethics is fundamentally, at bottom, ultimately arbitrary, because there is nothing that it corresponds to. It's just what we decide.
▶︎ 30:27 Currency is arbitrary. You can have the dollar, the pound, and the yen. There's one island that has giant, incredibly heavy stone circles with a hole in it. That's their currency. You can't be moving around just pointing, "That's mine." Doesn't matter. Whatever you want, that's your currency. Whatever value it is, that's fine because everyone has to agree on it. No right, no wrong. If the gods create ethics, that's what ethics is.
▶︎ 30:57 If piety is pious because the gods love it, then whatever the gods love is pious. And they can love whatever they feel like. Since 1958, the Gallup poll has taken a survey that says if your political party nominated a candidate who was qualified in every other way, in every way, but was blank, would you still vote for them? And they fill in the blank with different qualities, woman, Black, gay, et cetera. And they try to find out what qualities are the most disqualifying for Americans, which of these things. And up until recently, up until just, I believe, it was 2008, 2012, the most disqualifying property was atheism.
▶︎ 32:00 If you had all of the right positions, had all the right education, were a good upstanding human being, but you didn't believe in God, most people, most Americans would not vote for you. And I think one of the reasons why was because there's this idea that God is the source of morality, and therefore you cannot be moral without God. What Socrates is exploring here are the implications of that view. He's not saying it's wrong. What he's saying is, if you believe that, you have to also believe these. These beliefs are implied or entailed by that belief, which means if you believe that, these must also be true.
▶︎ 32:55 And he's not saying that those are wrong. You just have to be aware of the consequences of your beliefs. This is what he does when he goes through these debates with people, shows them the consequences of their beliefs. And then he says, "It's up to you whether you wanna believe it or not." So if you believe that ethics is created by God, then you also have to believe that ethics is fundamentally, ultimately arbitrary and could be anything that God wanted it to be. And that the whole question of correctness or goodness of the system is inapplicable, doesn't make any sense.
▶︎ 33:32 Once God has determined good and bad, there is good and bad. It's not that it's fake. It's not real. This dollar is worth a dollar. I can buy stuff with it. But the source of it is subjective. The source of this is society. The source of good and bad is, on some interpretations, God, on some interpretations, society. Some people think that society constructed good and evil. And in that case, society could have done it many, many different ways.
▶︎ 34:07 Now, when Socrates is debating this with Euthyphro, again, he's just laying these options out. But I do think that Socrates has to believe that the gods love piety because it's pious, rather than piety is pious because the gods love it. I think that Socrates has to believe that ethics is like the apple and not the dollar bill, that there are objective facts about ethics. And here's why I think this. This is my view. Another implication of divine command theory or subjective creation is that because there's no reason for it, there's no fundamental justification, it's not based on any fact, it could have gone any way.
▶︎ 35:10 One, it's contingent. And that means there's no fact around us, there's no evidence around us that we could examine to figure it out, because it's not based on any evidence. If you were kidnapped and drugged and woke up somewhere, you didn't know where you were, and you found a road without any markings on it and you wanted to walk along it, you wanted to face traffic because it's safer to face traffic when you walk than have it at your back, but you didn't know which country you were in, so you didn't know which side of the road traffic was going on. Some countries go to the left, sometimes go on the right. How would you figure it out? If you had all the best scientific instruments, you had electron microscopes to examine the asphalt, you could take the atmosphere, readings, you could do anything you wanted, nothing would tell you until you saw a car, until you could ask someone, because it's not based on anything about the soil or the gravel or anything. It's just a decision. The decision, it could be made either way.
▶︎ 36:21 If that's the case with ethics, that means that there is no way for you to, by yourself, figure out what is good and what is evil. What is good and what is evil is decided by the gods or society or whoever it is. It is relative. It's not absolute, it's not even, it's relative, it changes with whoever the gods are, whoever the society is, whatever they decide. And the only way to find this out is by someone telling you. You've got to be informed of this, because there's no way to infer it on your own, there's no way to reason it out. Reason is helpless to tell you this, because it's just someone's decision.
▶︎ 37:17 And the gods, because the Greek gods tend to be rather capricious and petty and make all kinds of weird decisions. Which means that Euthyphro's reliance on the myths that we saw at the beginning is, in some ways, inescapable. That's all we have are these stories. That's the only way that we can figure out what the gods are like, and only by figuring out what the gods are like can we tell what's good and bad. But what if the stories are wrong? What if someone wrote it down wrong? What if the gods changed? How would you know?
▶︎ 37:57 That option leaves the individual utterly helpless in figuring anything out. You are entirely dependent on being told the right answer. If you happen to be born into the right society that worships the right gods, and you're told the truths about the gods, then you're in luck, then you can know what good and bad is. If any one of those is missing, if you're born in a society that worships the wrong gods, if your parents worshiped the wrong gods, if they just misunderstood that, you're screwed. You're gonna be doing the wrong behavior your whole life and never knowing it, because you have no defense.
▶︎ 38:42 And what is Socrates doing? In the dialogue, for the dialogue to make sense, for the dialogue to have a point at all, he must be able, in principle, possibly, to figure these things out. He is asking what is good and what is bad, and he is analyzing this, he is seeking the answer by reasoning, by applying thought. Therefore, the entire exercise is futile, is meaningless unless the individual, by thinking, can find their way to the truth. And if piety is pious because the gods love it, you can't. You just can't. Not only do you have to rely on the stories, but even those are unreliable.
▶︎ 39:51 The whole endeavor of philosophy, the entire activity that Socrates is engaged in, that we are watching, that we are engaged in as we think along with this, depends on the idea that we can think our way to the answer, that reason can illuminate the truth. And I believe, Socrates does not say this, it's not in the dialogue, but I believe that requires, at least at this point, that the gods love piety because it's pious. So we get to, it means that piety has intrinsic qualities. Goodness is goodness because it's good. So that the gods perceive the goods, and we can perceive the goodness. We're both seeing the same thing, and we can find it just as the gods can find it. It might be harder for us, but we can get there if we think and if we talk to each other, if we help each other out, which is what he's doing in this dialogue.
▶︎ 41:02 This is what Socrates is doing within the dialogue, and this is what Plato is doing with the dialogue. Because the interlocutor within the dialogue is Euthyphro, but the main interlocutor of all of these dialogues is the reader. The main dialogue going on is not the dialogue in the dialogue, it's the dialogue between you and the dialogue. Plato wants to examine your beliefs. Socrates is talking to Euthyphro, but Euthyphro's just a stand-in for you.
▶︎ 41:43 As Socrates examines Euthyphro's beliefs, he is examining you, your beliefs. As Socrates teaches Euthyphro how to think, he is teaching you to think, and all of Western civilization how to think. Which means there must be something to think about. Now, later philosophers will come up with much more sophisticated ideas, a version of this, where perhaps you could use philosophy for these things, but at this point, really, I think there would be simply no point for the whole endeavor unless there is an objective truth that Socrates can find, that reason is capable of finding. And this is what he's searching for and this is what he's training us to search for.
▶︎ 42:34 Now, what the upshot of all this is, is that if refutation, if definition three is right, piety is what all the gods love, what this objection shows, isn't that it's wrong. Again, he's at a meta-ethical level, not the ethical level. He's showing the problems with the structure of it. What this shows, isn't that it's wrong. And it solves the action guiding problem. The problem here is number three, essence.
▶︎ 43:13 If the gods love piety because it is pious, then their love of it is not the essence of it. That's not why things are pious. The third definition is piety is what all the gods love. Well, the fact that all the gods love piety is just a property that it happens to have. All the gods could stop loving it and it would still be pious. We could all stop eating apples and they would remain nutritious. Whereas if we all stopped valuing dollar bills, they would become valueless.
▶︎ 43:50 What we're after, if we want to understand, we must get to the core of the X, of the property. Piety, goodness. And if the gods love piety because it's pious, then there's something about piety that defines it as piety, which is what makes the gods love it. So the gods' love is a response to this property, and that's what we're after. That property, the property that makes it piety that then solicits their love. That's what we want. Their love is irrelevant.
▶︎ 44:32 Again, Socrates is a very religious man, but he's talking about the nature of goodness here. And therefore, the first definition was the example, that's not universal. The second definition, what's dear to the gods, they are sometimes in conflict. When they're in conflict, we don't know what to do, that fails the action guiding requirement. The third one, what all the gods love, the second one solved the first problem, it's no longer an example. The third definition solved the second problem, it doesn't have a contradiction, but now we don't have the essential definition. We have a property of it. And we move on to the fourth definition.
▶︎ 45:19 And here, the dialogue breaks down a bit. And he talks about it as some kind of trading skill with the gods, giving them what they want, getting what we want out of it. Socrates points out, "Hey, that doesn't really make sense. They're so much more powerful than us, there's nothing we could give them they couldn't get for themselves. And we couldn't do anything for them. We couldn't improve them in any way because they're so much superior to us."
▶︎ 45:47 But there's a very interesting moment in here where Socrates says, "Oh, Euthyphro, you almost had the answer there, but you turned away from it." Now, this could just be Socratic irony, "Oh, you know it and you didn't tell me it." But there's something very specific about that response. And in the Apology, this is the trial that comes immediately after the Euthyphro ends. In the Apology, Socrates has a very famous line, where he says, "The greatest thing that anyone can do is discuss virtue all day. Go back and forth and have these conversations to try to figure out what is right and what is wrong, because the unexamined life is not worth living."
▶︎ 46:33 The unexamined life in this case means a person who does not examine their beliefs. This is the way Euthyphro was at the beginning. He wasn't examining his beliefs, he thought for sure he knew what the right thing to do was, and he simply acted on that. What Socrates is trying to do is trying to provoke people into examining their beliefs.
▶︎ 46:55 You wouldn't fly a plane unless you really knew how planes work and how to pilot them. You wouldn't operate on a person unless you knew human anatomy and you knew how all that worked. Well, Socrates thinks that every day we're making ethical decisions without the basis of ethical knowledge, and that's just as irresponsible as flying a plane without a license or operating on a person without a medical degree. We're making decisions that affect people deeply, significantly, without spending a second thinking about what is the right thing to do in these situations. And that is what he's trying to get people to do. He's trying to stop them from just throwing themselves headlong into action and pause and examine for a moment.
▶︎ 47:47 And he says he's doing this in service to the god. There's a lot more detail to it that we're not getting into, but one of the things that's so interesting about that is how it connects to the Euthyphro. Because right here towards the end, he's talking about the fourth definition, this trading skill with the gods, and he's talking about doing services for the gods, and he says, "Look, we can't do anything for them. We can't improve them the way we improve a horse or a dog when we take care of them." And they kind of stop there.
▶︎ 48:26 And it ends in aporia, Euthyphro says, "Oh gosh, look at the time. I forgot I had an appointment," and flees the way people often do when their ignorance is shown by Socrates. But what Socrates shows in the Apology, comes right after that, he shows people what a service to the gods could look like. It doesn't improve the gods, it improves people. It improves his fellow humans on behalf of the gods. You see, it's true that we can't make the gods better, but we can make each other better.
▶︎ 49:07 And if the gods are truly better than us in the right ways, not just faster and smarter and not just faster and stronger, but better, more ethical, then they don't want anything from us. They want good things for us. They're not trading with us to take our money and get stuff from us. They're more like benevolent parents who want the best for us. And what the best thing for us is, in Socrates' opinion, is that we become more ethical, which requires us to examine our beliefs, get sure that we have the right ideas. What this means is, and this is the supreme irony of the Euthyphro, took me years to see
▶︎ 49:56 This is that the two of them are searching for the definition of piety when the very search that they're engaged in is the most pious thing they can do. The answer to their question is the questioning that they're engaged in. Socrates, who is about to be sentenced to death for impiety, for this very action, is engaged in this action in the highest act of piety possible.
▶︎ 50:37 He is doing everything he can to make his fellow humans more thoughtful, more, examine themselves, their beliefs, their souls, their actions, so that they can live better, behave better, be more ethical. And this is the quest she has bequeathed to us, some two millennia later, which we will pursue throughout the rest of this course.