Euthyphro Questions

1. I agree that belief in God is the only basis for morality. The rightness or wrongness of an action has to be predicated on something outside of ourselvessome objective truth or law. If there is a law, there must be a law giver. This objective rule or law or standard or ethic is what could be called the universals or the transcendentals. They can be understood by all people. Obviously, different cultures are going to have different beliefs about what is moral to some degree because human beings are always influencing one another and shaping their societies in their own ways rather than conforming to the universal law that one can understand if one applies reason to the issue, the way Plato and Aristotle did. Just because a culture has a certain position on an action being moral and another culture has a different position on it does not in any way lessen the truth that universals exist. People can refuse to acknowledge them or argue against them all they like, just as Euthyphro does. The point is that a moral society works towards knowing the truth rather than running from the labor. Euthyphro runs from it because he senses that it might end up making him question his own sense of righteousness, and he would rather not do that. Ultimately, however, it does come back to God, for there has to be a higher power that has authored this rule that people can ascertain with their reason. This is why Socrates directs the discussion with Euthyphro toward the will of the gods, because it is a matter of conforming oneself to the will of the divinity that established the moral order or law in the first place. Euthyphro wants to twist the law to conform to his own will. That is not morality, as far as Socrates is concerned.

2. Socrates is on...…the gods. However, it is also subject to criticism, as Socrates continues to probe its implications and consistency in the dialogue.

9. Socrates criticizes Euthyphro's second definition by introducing a philosophical dilemma that is now known as the Euthyphro Dilemma. He asks whether the gods love the pious because it is pious, or whether it is pious because the gods love it. The first option would suggest that there is a standard of piety independent of the gods, while the second would suggest that piety is arbitrary and based solely on the gods' whims. This puts Euthyphro in a difficult position and effectively dismantles his second definition. What Socrates is able to do here is show that the stories the Greeks have of the gods are an inconsistent representation of the divinity or rather the divine law of goodness that must characterize God. Knowledge of the stories of the gods is insufficient if one is truly seeking the truth about…