In this essay I examine the motivations behind Socrates' pursuit of a precise definition of a virtue. The particular virtue that interests me is piety, examined by Socrates and his interlocutor, Euthyphro, in Plato's Euthyphro. Like many of Plato's early dialogues, Euthyphro features the standard Socratic question “What is F,” in which F signifies a virtue or mark of human excellence. Despite Socrates' and Euthyphro's mutual failure to arrive at a satisfactory definition of F – in this case, piety – an identifiable motivation drives Socrates' dialogue: his interest in ascertaining a universal model of piety against which particular deeds can be measured. The universality of such a model would allow it to serve as a practical guide for recognizing instances of piety.
[...] Meletus has charged Socrates with the crime of creating new gods and not believing in the old ones (3b). Socrates appears at court to respond to the charge. The punishment for his alleged impiety is grave, as revealed in the later dialogues Apology and Crito. It is thus fitting that Socrates challenges Euthyphro to offer a definition of piety, for the challenge stages a practice dialectic that may prove useful in his upcoming defense before the court against the charge of impiety. [...]
[...] He pursues the question by framing piety first in the passive tense and then the active tense. By analogy, Socrates considers, speak of something carried and something carrying” (10). The point is that a precise definition must capture the active or intrinsic properties of what it defines. Because being loved by gods is not essential to piety, but is instead only a state that piety undergoes, Socrates discards the third definition. The fourth definition is Socrates' suggestion, that is pious is of necessity just” (11e). [...]
[...] Socrates essays to capture with greater generality the variety of services to the gods that he and Euthyphro consider in their refinements of the previous definition. This time Socrates does not object to the definition by eliciting a further criterion of precision. Rather, he questions, are [the gods] benefited by what they receive from suggesting that the gods do not need human gifts (15). Instead of invoking conditions of precision what I have labeled identity, purity, inherency, and exclusivity that the definition must satisfy in order to be an authoritative model, Socrates objects to the final definition by appealing directly to what he takes to already by authoritative knowledge of the gods. [...]
[...] The difference between the practical ethical purpose and the metaphysical purpose of the definition turns on how Socrates would employ it in order to identify whether an instance that kind is pious.” The model, I am suggesting, does not cause an instance of piety to be a member of the kind In this sense, an instance of piety does not participate in the model (as later dialogues construe the relation between material instances and ideal forms). The model, when wielded with the precision Socrates seeks, allows someone to identify instances of piety with infallible authority, and presumably orient one's practices in a pious manner. [...]
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