From Plato's Euthyphro: S: So we have to begin again at the very beginning, investigating what holiness is. And I won’t willingly give up before I figure it out. Don’t think me unworthy; instead, concentrate your attention to a supreme degree and tell the truth. For you know this thing, if any man does, and so I will clutch you as tightly as if you were Proteus himself, until you tell me. If you had no clear knowledge of holiness and unholiness, you would hardly have been so rash as to prosecute your dear old dad for murder on behalf of a servant. Fear of the gods would have restrained you from taking such a risk of acting wrongly. So I definitely know that you believe you have clear knowledge of holiness and unholiness. So tell me, my good Euthyphro, and don’t keep secret what you think it is. E: Some other time, Socrates. I am in a hurry, and I really have to go now. S: What a thing to do, my friend! By leaving you cast me down from my high hope of learning from you the nature of holiness and unholiness. I might have escaped Meletus' indictment by exhibiting to him my wisdom – courtesy of Euthyphro – concerning divine matters. Ignorance would no longer have made me sloppy and improvisational about such things, and my whole life might have been lived the better for it. [back] Mark writes: The real meaning of the Euthyphro, I'm convinced, needs to be understood in light of a careful reading of the Apology. I think it has to do with the problem of social criticism, or the criticism of one's own intellectual tradition. The background story of the Euthyphro is Euthyphro's prosecution of his own father for murder. The facts of the case, as presented in the dialogue, seem pointlessly complex. One of the father's servants had gotten drunk and killed a household slave. The father had caused the offender to be tied up and tossed into a ditch, and sent off to a priest for advice about how to handle the situation, but before the answer came back the prisoner had died of exposure and neglect. On that basis, Euthyphro accuses his father of murder. I grant Mark his first paragraph. I do see the point. But I have to dissent from the second. The facts of the case are not pointlessly complex. The point of the complexity is to wrong-foot Euthyphro. Euthyphro thinks WWZD - what would Zeus do? - is a potent formula for producing right answers to ethical questions. And, so long as you stick with stark and simple stuff - murder bad, temple-robbing bad - you can get along this way. If the only tool you have is the hammer of Thor (pardon the mixed pantheon), all problems start to look like nails. Works OK so long as you deal with nails. But Euthyphro's complex case is obviously not a simple nail to be driven straight. We have here a potential case of negligent manslaughter. Factor in that the victim was a murderer and the whole business a citizen's arrest gone sour. Throw in the ringer of the father-son defendant-prosecutor relationship. WWZD is starting to look like a blunt tool indeed. As Socrates ironizes: By Olympus! Certainly most men would not know how to go about a thing like this and end up in the right, Euthyphro. This isn’t a thing for just anyone to do. This is a job for one far advanced in wisdom! The wonder of Euthyphro is that he has such a strong, simple, unshakably confident opinion of a highly complex case on the basis of nothing that could be mistaken, on a moment's reflection, for sufficient warrant. By way of illustrative comparison: there is a good reason why those 'what do you think?' features in the paper don't usually ask technical stuff like 'what is element 79 on the periodic table of the elements?' (Actually, that would be pretty funny as an Onion piece, if done right. Probably it's been done.) Because if someone stops you on the street and asks you that, you will either give the answer - if you know, or have reason to think you know - or else you will say 'I don't know.' It would be distinctly weird if you somehow spontaneously auto-induced the delusion that you knew the answer even though you had never studied the periodic table. If you just blurt something out - whatever pops into your head - absurdly confident that it must be quite correct, you are insane. All this has to do, of course, with Plato's unfortunate - but interesting - determination to resolve all political and ethical questions into technical questions. (Plato would have hated those 'what do you think?' columns.) But more interesting still is the fact that we have met the enemy, and he is us. We are Euthyphro. The vice of punditry - to pick an activity near and dear to most of our hearts - is willingness to pronounce with unfeigned confidence on matters one is clearly strictly incompetent to judge. Send the question man out into the street to ask folks, 'Should Bush get tough with North Korea?' and people who cannot even find North Korea on the map, or name its dear leader, will have strong opinions. And these folks aren't feigning opinionation. These genuinely are their opinions, even if - one second before - they didn't even have an opinion. Where have these opinions from? Inquiring minds want to know. (How many times have you acted like Euthyphro this week? Seriously.) The crucial flipside comes at the end. Socrates has manifestly knocked Euthyphro's position legless, but it is still standing. Euthyphro is hastening off - clearly irritated, but intellectually unmoved. Despite the fact that he has been shown to be utterly incapable of justifying his position, he is not at all inclined to question his own position. Of course, this is perfectly normal. We see it all the time. But its investigation is part of an ongoing project of Plato's: pathological philosophical personalities. Most people are pathological when they talk about philosophy - or ethics, or politics. They believe things strongly for no reason, and when they appear to have reasons, those reasons are ornaments, not foundations, i.e. if you knock them away, the things they seemed to be upholding do not have the decency to fall down and break. I teach Euthyphro along with Meno and Book I of Republic (and 'The Myth of the Cave'.) For me the red thread is: reason and persuasion. For example, how is it that Meno manages to think you can't know anything - i.e. as a follower of Gorgias, he thinks that you can argue for and against anything; while also believing he sort of knows everything - e.g. about virtue. (It seems like his head ought to explode, but it doesn't.) For Plato - and this obviously connects very much with Apology - the problem is figuring out how rational arguments can get past all this pathology, or at least how you can keep yourself from being put to death. Consider the opening of Book I of Republic: Polemarchus said to me: Socrates, I see you and our friend here are already headed back to the city. You’ve guessed right, I said. But don’t you see how many of us there are, he replied? Of course. Either you must overpower all of us, or you will have to stay where you are. Isn’t there another way, I said; namely, that we could persuade you to let us go? But can you persuade us if we won’t listen? he said. Certainly not, replied Glaucon. Then we aren’t going to listen; you can count on it. People not listening is, in a way, the problem that Plato constructs an entire ideal state to solve. Well, that's enough for today.