An Argument to Keep in Your Wallet

Most readers begin Plato with the Apology. Goldstein begins with the Euthyphro, because it shows Socrates doing the very thing that got him arrested. He is waiting on the portico for a hearing on charges of impiety when he meets Euthyphro, a self-declared expert on holiness who is there to prosecute his own father.

What follows is the question at passage 10a: is something holy because the gods approve it, or do the gods approve it because it is holy? Goldstein walks through why either answer leaves divine approval doing no moral work, and why free thinkers from Spinoza to Bertrand Russell have carried the argument ever since. She thinks it belongs on a laminated card in everyone's wallet.

The film sits at the start of the first dialogue. The Euthyphro is short, and this is the key to it.

Transcript

It is customary to begin the reading of Plato's dialogues with the Apology, but I'm starting with another dialogue, the Euthyphro, because it shows Socrates in the kind of action that got him arrested in the first place.

At the time in which the Euthyphro is set, Socrates has already been charged with impiety and corrupting youth. He's on the portico of the Royal Stoa, a public space, awaiting his turn to appear before the magistrate who was in charge of overseeing religious rites and also presiding over trials of homicide. Socrates is about to have a preliminary hearing that will determine whether there is just cause for him to be put on trial. You'd imagine that he'd be preoccupied with his own life-threatening predicament, since he's charged with a capital offense. But no, he's in fine form, up to his usual shenanigans, in trying to demonstrate to a fellow citizen that he's not making any sense. His target is a priceless character named Euthyphro, a diviner and self-declared expert on all things holy. I've met plenty of Euthyphros in my life.

Euthyphro is also awaiting his turn to see the high priest. He wants to indict his father on a charge of homicide for having accidentally killed a hireling who had himself killed another worker in a fit of anger. To charge a father of murder under such murky circumstances, when the code of family loyalty ran very deep in Athens, immediately arouses Socrates' skepticism, though he masks his reaction beneath his famous irony. Socrates declares that Euthyphro alone can save him in this, his moment of need, by instructing him on the nature of holiness, so that he can present himself to his accusers as altogether chaste. With an interlocutor as deaf to sarcasm as to philosophical subtlety, Plato's Socrates proceeds to formulate a line of reasoning that will prove to be of fundamental importance in the history of secularism, one that will be parroted by free thinkers from Spinoza to Bertrand Russell to Sam Harris as persuasively arguing that a belief in the divine can't possibly provide the grounding for morality. I think the Euthyphro argument ought to be printed on a laminated card and carried in everyone's wallet.

The heart of the argument occurs in the passage numbered 10a, when Socrates asks Euthyphro whether what is holy is holy because gods approve it, or rather, do the gods approve it because it's holy? The argument is formulated in terms of gods because religion in ancient Greece was pantheistic, but it can be adapted to monotheism without losing anything. Plato's argument in a nutshell is this: if God approves of an action, say protecting the weak and defenseless, either he approves of it arbitrarily, for no reason at all, so that it's only his approving it that gives it moral value, or else there's a reason for his approving of it. If the former is the case, then how does this arbitrary whim, even if it's divine arbitrary whim, confer moral value? But if the latter is the case, then there's a reason for the divine moral attitude, and that reason is the reason both for God's approval and for the moral worth of that of which he approves. This makes God's approval, morally speaking, redundant. He is, as we would say today, simply giving it a rubber stamp.

The Euthyphro argument remains one of the most frequently utilized arguments against the claim that morality can be grounded only in theism. Dostoevsky may have declared that "without God, all is permissible," but Plato's response, offered before Abrahamic monotheism swept the world, is that if some act, say genocide, is impermissible with God, it's just as impermissible without God. There's got to be an independent reason, and we don't know anything, morally speaking, until we know the reason. Plato's argument provides the impetus for that branch of philosophy known as moral philosophy. Following Plato, such philosophers as Aristotle, Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and many more have reformed our moral intuitions using reasoned arguments, so that we can now look back at the slave-owning, captive-slaughtering, sexist, and elitist Athenians knowing how much they got wrong. As, no doubt, our descendants will look back at some of our practices and wonder how we could have been so morally obtuse. And how stunning that Plato puts this argument into the mouth of the man awaiting a hearing on the charges of impiety and corrupting the young.