If a noble birth were a reliable predictor of philosophical greatness, then no one would have expected much from Socrates. Born in Athens in 469 BCE to a stonemason and midwife of modest means, Socrates was destined for an ordinary life as a common laborer—fated to be forgotten with the passage of time.
But Socrates chose to shape minds rather than stone. His domain was the intellect; his method, relentless questioning. He chipped away at pretensions to knowledge, forcing his fellow Athenians to define their terms. He pushed all who would listen beyond the thoughtless appeals to tradition that made such a life—the unexamined life—not worth living. In short, he did nothing less than teach the Western mind how to think.
For this great service, Socrates was neither compensated nor celebrated, but instead convicted and killed. The state, then as now, prefers obedient thinkers to skeptical minds. But they could harm only his body; his subversive method of questioning would live on in the works of Plato, Aristotle, and every other philosopher in the Western canon who valued the unwavering pursuit of truth.
But truth, it seems, is something everyone believes they possess—especially when it comes to God. Socrates, however, was about to put that confidence on trial.
When Cicero said that Socrates “brought down philosophy from the heavens,” he’s usually taken to mean that Socrates shifted philosophical discussion from the natural world to the human realm of ethics, morality, and daily life. But he actually did far more than that; in the dialogue Euthyphro, Socrates brought ethics itself down from the heavens, placing it firmly and permanently into the secular sphere.
Socrates—like Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius—never wrote a single line of text. Fortunately for Socrates, he had the literary genius of Plato to immortalize his name. Plato’s dialogues—philosophy in its “most beautiful, free, and living form,” according to Hegel—are masterpieces of world literature. They flow like “rivers of gold,” according to Cicero. So there’s always the possibility that Socrates is in some sense an invention. Plato, it must be admitted, could have invented him. But it makes no difference—Socrates comes alive on the page. Whether historical or fictional or something in between, Socrates rouses the intellect and focuses the mind.
Plato wrote dozens of dialogues—enough to occupy a lifetime of study. But for our purposes, Euthyphro rises above the rest. In just under 20 pages, it poses a question so sharp that it forever cleaves morality from the authority of the gods. And once you see the dilemma, there is no going back.
The dialogue begins with Socrates encountering Euthyphro on his way to his own indictment at court. Euthyphro is quite surprised to see him there, as he finds it hard to believe that Socrates would be the one prosecuting a case. Alas, Euthyphro learns that Socrates has, in fact, been indicted by Meletus, under the charges of “impiety and corrupting the youth” and for “creating new gods and not believing in the old gods.” These allegations were not minor: charges of impiety carried with them charges of treason—religion and politics were not yet disentangled as they are today.
Euthyphro, it turns out, was there for similar reasons, except, in his case, he is the one doing the prosecuting. To Socrates’s great surprise, he learns that Euthyphro is to be prosecuting his own father, who negligently, but unintentionally, killed a servant who himself murdered a household slave.
After admitting that most people think that prosecuting your own father under such circumstances is a bit eccentric, even impious, Euthyphro confidently proclaims that this is only because most people’s “ideas of the divine attitude to piety and impiety” are wrong. Euthyphro proceeds to claim that, contrary to almost everyone else, he alone holds accurate knowledge of all things divine and righteous.
In typical Socratic fashion, Socrates uses this as an opportunity to feign ignorance on the topic so that Euthyphro can educate him on the correct divine attitude to piety, so that he may use this knowledge in his own legal defense.
And so the stage is set for Socrates to make Euthyphro eat his words.
The respective cases for both Socrates and Euthyphro hinge on the definition of piety. Unless they can pin down what piety actually is, they have little hope of defending against charges of impiety. But lucky for Socrates, Euthyphro already has this knowledge—which he so confidently proclaims—and so Socrates can simply leverage Euthyphro’s infallible wisdom for use in his own legal defense. So Socrates sets about asking some questions.
Ultimately, he needs Euthyphro to define what pious (morally right) actions are, in all cases, so that he can know whether or not any of his specific actions have been impious. But when he asks Euthyphro for a definition, Euthyphro simply tells him that piety is doing exactly what he is currently doing—prosecuting his father, who he believes has done wrong.
Socrates reminds him that he did not ask for a list of specific pious actions, but instead for a definition of what piety is in all cases, since Euthyphro had already agreed that all pious actions take one form, and that he knew what this form was. This is standard fare for Socrates; he forces his interlocutor to commit to a position that the simple listing of examples will not resolve. A standard must be established by which all specific cases can be judged.
So Euthyphro continues, only to keep spinning in circles. This time, he defines piety as “what is dear to the gods.” Socrates then reminds him that the gods themselves often can’t agree—that a single action may be considered pious by one god and impious by another—and, since an action can’t be both pious and impious at the same time, that this definition of piety also cannot hold.
What Socrates does next is what is most important to us—and to the connection between morality and religion that Socrates is about to quietly dismantle.
Since Euthyphro remains firmly committed to defining piety as whatever the gods love, Socrates presses the point further. He poses the following question—now known as the Euthyphro Dilemma—that strikes at the very heart of Divine Command Theory:
Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?
In other words—and to use a concrete example—is the prosecution of Euthyphro’s father loved by the gods because it is a pious action in itself, and that’s why they love it, or is his prosecution a pious action simply because the gods love it—by virtue of their preferences—independent of any objective or outside criteria?
Answering this turns out to be a little trickier than it appears. Euthyphro himself couldn’t answer it, and ultimately walked away. But let’s see if we can do any better.
Suppose we think that an action is pious because it is loved by the gods (or God, in our case). Many people do think this, in fact. But it turns out, upon examination, that this places you in a fairly compromising ethical position—for it requires you to concede that any action loved by God is righteous. If God, for instance, told you to murder your son—as the God of Abraham actually did—you’d have to accept that this would be a perfectly righteous thing to do.
Other examples readily come to mind, but the point stands: as long as you admit that there is something you’d refuse to do—even if commanded by God to do it—then the idea that an action is pious simply by virtue of God’s love must be rejected.
You’re now forced into the second horn of the dilemma: that an action is loved by God because it is pious or righteous. That seems more reasonable. Caring for your child, for example, and not murdering them, is loved by God because it is, independently (and biologically), a good thing to do. You don’t need God’s direction to know this.
But notice the key term independently. If an action is good before it is loved by God—which is why He loves it—then the goodness of the action cannot be dependent on God’s acceptance. And if that’s the case, then divine instruction can no longer serve as our final authority; moral law stands above even God. We must judge each action on its own merits, weighing the real harms and benefits it brings to real people. In other words, the atheist and the theist must approach ethical problems in much the same way—even if God exists. No one, that is to say, is absolved from the responsibility of critical thinking.
Theists, at this point, are losing their patience. They would tell us that we’ve overlooked an important point—that the Euthyphro “dilemma” is not actually a dilemma at all. In fact, there’s a simple way out—a third option.
While it’s true, they’d say, that an action is pious because it is loved by God, it is loved by God because it is in God’s nature to be all-loving and good. This position, called Modified Divine Command Theory, still claims that moral obligations depend on God’s directives, but that moral goodness itself depends on God’s character. God’s commands are therefore neither arbitrary nor morally blind; they express a stable and perfectly good nature.
Socrates, I think, would be less than impressed. He would notice the circularity straight away: A good action is loved by God because it’s in His nature to love good things. But what makes a thing “good” is precisely the question. We can still ask: Is God’s nature good by its own accord, or is it good according to some independent criteria?
This is the original dilemma—stated in different terms. If we blindly accept the idea that God’s nature is good, then we’re in exactly the same compromising ethical situation as before—forced to thoughtlessly carry out God’s orders.
We can think about this in another way. Theists often explain to us that God “works in mysterious ways,” implying that we cannot—and should not even try to—understand the mind of God. It follows, then, that we have no basis for questioning His commands (or nature), and, once again, must—if He commands it—commit atrocious acts. It’s not hard to see why this presents problems. Consider the following verse taken from the Bible:
Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys (1 Samuel 15:3).
That’s Divine Command Theory for you. Blind obedience to divine orders is always dangerous—for we can never be certain whether we truly understand God’s will, or whether we are merely mistaking our own voice for His. If God (or the voice in your head) tells you, like He told Abraham, to murder your own child at the summit of a mountain—or, as in Samuel, to put to death children and infants—the appropriate response is, “absolutely not.” It’s not, “well, since it’s in God’s nature to be good, I had better not question the command.” You should always, as Socrates taught us, question everything.
Euthyphro is a truly remarkable dialogue, not because it settles our knowledge of right and wrong, but because it does precisely the opposite—it keeps morality an open question. It effectively counters the assertion that there can be no possibility of morality without religion, by reminding us that we are always, ultimately, responsible for evaluating the ethical ramifications of any action—especially actions we may consider to be divinely sanctioned.
So, the next time someone asks you if morality can exist without religion, you can tell them, not only that it can, but that it must. The only way to navigate the conflicting interpretations of religious scripture is to ground morality in standards that stand independent of them. And in the end, what truly determines whether an action is morally justified is the balance of harm and benefit it brings to those it affects. This secular, moral calculus is not always straightforward and without tradeoffs—which is what makes morality so complicated in the first place. The only real danger is in pretending it’s not.
References
Adams, Robert Merrihew. Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Plato. Plato: Five Dialogues. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981.