Socrates meets Euthyphro on the steps of the courthouse. Socrates is there to face charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. Euthyphro is there to bring charges against his father. The name Euthyphro means straight thought. The name is apt. He is not straight in the sense of being true, but of being incapable of seeing beyond his narrow focus. He says that because of his knowledge of divine things he is laughed at in the assembly and thought to be mad. (3c) He represents a character type. A type that seems incapable of knowing his ignorance.

Euthyphro claims to be a diviner and to know divine and pious things precisely (5a). Socrates ironically proposes that he become Euthyphro’s student. He asks him to identify the “idea” of the pious and impious. (5d) Euthyphro responds that what he is doing is pious. His answer is typical and the problem obvious. He assumes he knows what the pious is and so is certain that what he is doing is pious.

He points to Zeus’ castrating his father as justification for his bringing charges of murder against his own father. He assumed that by imitating Zeus, “the best and most just of the gods” (5e) that he too will be doing what is best and most just. The question of what is pious is then connected to the question of what is best and just. But to question whether if what Zeus did is just is, it would seem, impious. But it is necessary. Euthyphro unquestioningly accepts that Zeus is just. The evidence points in the opposite direction, but he accepts what he has been told and bends the idea of justice to conform.

Socrates returns to the question of the eidos of piety. Euthyphro now gives the kind of answer Socrates is looking for:

What is dear to (loved by) the gods is pious, and what is not dear is impious. (6e)

Socrates reminds Euthyphro of the quarrel between the gods. He points out that there is no quarrel when it comes to such things as calculation, greater or less, weight, that is not easily resolved. But when it comes to questions of the just and unjust, noble and shameful, good and bad we differ and these differences make us enemies. It is not because we are enemies that we differ but because we differ that we become enemies. (7d)

Socrates asks whether the gods disagree about such things. Euthyphro first denies that they do but then admits that they do (8a). The question of what is just, noble, and good has not been answered by the gods. It would seem that they have no knowledge of such things, for if they did there would be no disagreement.

The same thing then would both be loved and hated, pious and impious. What is loved by Zeus would be hated by his father Cronus. Euthyphro revises his answer, the pious is what all the gods love, and what all the gods hate is impious. (9e)

Socrates asks:

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved? (10a)

Euthyphro says he does not understand. Socrates says he will “try to explain it more plainly”, but what he says seems designed to confuse rather than make it clear. Or rather, it is intended to show the incoherence of the claim. It says no more than that what is loved is loved. The question of why this is loved and that is not loved is not addressed. That this is loved and not that tells us nothing about whether what is loved is best and just.

In confusion Euthyphro says:

But Socrates, I have no way of telling you what I have in mind. For whatever we put forward somehow always keeps going around for us and isn’t willing to stay where we place it. (11b)

Socrates now offers to show Euthyphro how he can teach Socrates about the pious. (11e) Things have indeed gone around with the need for the student to teach the teacher. Socrates proposes that the pious is what is just. (11e)

Socrates gets him to agree that where odd is there number and not where there is number there is odd. (12b) But there cannot be odd without number. The significance of this becomes clear when Socrates asks whether where the just is there too is the pious, or if it is that where the pious is there too is the just. Is the pious part of the just? (12d)

Just as there is no odd without number there is no piety without the just. If Euthyphro were to give an answer that is consistent with what was said previously and with his answer regarding number and odd, he would answer that without piety the just would not be. One consequence of this is that the just would be whatever is loved. No matter what gods or men do it would be just if a god loved it.

But Euthyphro seems to have forgotten all that and now agrees that the pious is part of the just.
Socrates asks what part of justice the pious is. If we follow the example of number and odd, just as the other part of number is the even, the other part of justice would be impiety. Socrates’ pursuit of justice is in part impious, he questions what should be piously accepted as true.

Euthyphro says that the part of justice that is pious is tendance to the gods. (12e) As tendance to horses requires knowledge of horses, and tendance to dogs or tendance to cattle knowledge of dogs and cattle, there must be knowledge of gods if one is to tend to them. (13a) Euthyphro does not object to this because he assumes he has knowledge of the gods, but when Socrates says that tenance to horses or dogs must benefit horses and dogs Euthyphro objects. He denies that man benefits the gods, that we make the gods better. (13c)

Euthyphro says that tenance to the gods is as slaves tend to their masters. (13d) Socrates asks what the noble work is that the gods do with us as their servants. (13e) Euthyphro answers “many noble things”. Socrates presses him to name the main thing they produce, Euthyphro says:

… if someone has knowledge of how to say and do things gratifying to the gods by praying and sacrificing, these are the pious things. And such things preserve private families as well as the communities of cities. (14b)

Euthyphro is prepared to destroy his own family and to the extent the family is necessary for the city, destroy the city as well in order to, as he imagines it, please the gods. And all because this “straight thinker” thinks he knows what pleases the gods.

Socrates asks once again what piety and impiety are. Euthyphro agrees that it is a certain kind of knowledge of sacrificing and praying, of giving gifts and making requests of the gods. (14c) Socrates calls this a kind of commerce. (14e) Euthyphro momentarily forgets that he had denied that the gods are benefited by us, but now recalls this. He says that what they get from us is honor, respect, and gratitude. (15a) But, Socrates points out, what is gratifying is what is dear to the gods.

The argument has gone around in a circle. Socrates proposes they begin again with the question of what the pious is. It is only if Euthyphro knows plainly what the pious and impious are that he can be sure that he is acting correctly in prosecuting his father. (15d)

But Euthyphro is unwilling to begin again:

Some other time, then, Socrates. For now I am in a hurry to go somewhere, and it is time for me to go away. (15e)

Where is he going in such a hurry? Has Socrates convinced him of his ignorance and prevented him from causing harm? Or is he in a hurry to proceed with the prosecution before he begins to doubt himself?

It is not piety that makes one just but rather one must be just in order to be pious. To answer the question that engendered this post, belief in god is not necessary for being good. In Euthyphro’s case, it is his belief that leads him to do what is unjust to his family and the city.