Essay Question: Midway through the discussion in Plato’s dialogue the Euthyphro,

Question

Essay Question:

Midway through the discussion in Plato’s dialogue the Euthyphro, Socrates claims that piety can only be one of two possibilities: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” Explain the two possibilities and why Socrates believes that only one of these options is plausible. Do we ever get a clear definition of piety? If not, what do we get? And finally, what is the connection between what Socrates says about piety and his overall understanding of truth? In your opinion, is Socrates right about truth?

Explanation / Answer

Midway through Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, Euthyphro suggests defining “the pious” as “what all the gods love”. Socrates responds by posing the following question: Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? This question has become famous. It not only marks a pivotal point in the dialogue but can also be seen as a “hinge” question in the Western philosophical tradition—an early fork in the road, so to speak. The question introduces a distinction between two radically different ways of thinking, a distinction that is still central to theoretical debates going on today. Indeed, a question of this form can serve as a kind of philosophical litmus test: how one responds indicates one’s most general philosophical orientation. To make question a little less abstract, let us focus on a particular instance of piety—say, showing hospitality to a stranger. Socrates presents us with two options:

Option 1: The gods love the act of hospitality because it is pious. On this view, the act of hospitality has some inherent quality that makes it pious; and it is because of this quality that the gods . Let us call this view essentialist. The reason for doing so is that it assumes piety to have an essence—a quality, or combination of 2 qualities, that all pious actions share, just as all triangles share the essential quality of three-sidedness. Any action that has this essential quality is pious; no action that lacks it can be pious. This seems to be Socrates’ view. And his search for definitions of concepts like piety is an attempt to identify and describe such essential qualities.

Option 2: The act of hospitality is pious because the gods love it. On this view, what makes the act of hospitality pious is not some inner essence but, rather, its being regarded in a certain way by someone. We could reasonably call this view “anti-essentialist”, but this label does not express the idea that a thing is what it is because it stands in a certain relation. To capture this idea, let us describe this second approach as relativist. Socrates’ question is most obviously important to moral philosophers and theologians, for it concerns the relation between morality and religion. The dilemma it poses can arise within any religious tradition. In the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, for instance, the question becomes: Is an action right because God approves of it, or does God approve of it because it is right? Could God have recast the ten commandments so as to prohibit sexual fidelity rather than adultery? Or was he bound by certain independent moral constraints when he handed down the commandments? The problem with the first option is that it makes God’s decrees arbitrary. God, it seems, just happens to have disapproved of adultery; had his whim been different then adultery would be permissible. The problem with the second option is that it seems to view moral principles as prior to or higher than the will of God— something orthodox theologians in monotheistic traditions have usually been reluctant to concede.

Now, the question of how God’s will relates to the moral law may be of real interest only to religious believers and hence less pressing in our increasingly secular culture. But the form of Socrates’ question, has implications beyond its original context, for the same choice between essentialism and relativism crops up in many areas. Take a question central to aesthetics, for instance, of what makes something a work of art. If, for simplicity’s sake, we confine ourselves to the visual arts, the question might be posed in this way:

Is a work exhibited in a gallery because it is art, or is it a work of art because it is placed in a gallery?

The first option is clearly the more “natural”, common-sensical view. We don’t put just any object in an art gallery; we select only those objects that have certain inherent qualities (e.g. manufactured beauty, or “significant form”) in virtue of which we consider them to be works of art. This is the essentialist approach. However, identifying these qualities turns out to be extraordinarily difficult since there always seem to be works that lack them but which we wish to classify as art (e.g. the common urinal that Duchamp entitled ‘Fountain”). For this reason, many have given up trying to describe any inner essence of art. Instead, they focus on the way it is regarded by the members of some community. “Art”, on this relativistic view, is simply a label we attach to the kind of object one finds in galleries.

A similar contrast can be drawn between two ways of thinking about that most central philosophical concept—truth. Take an uncontroversial statement like “The sea contains salt”. Call this statement S.

Do we believe S because it is true, or is it true because we believe it?

Here again, the “obvious” answer is the essentialist one. The truth or falsity of a statement is surely independent of whether or not we believe it or have good reasons for believing it. What makes a statement true—and this is the essence of truth, the property that all true statements have in common—is correspondence with reality. And what better reason could there be for believing a claim than that it is true? According to the relativist, however, this view is too simple. The truth of a statement cannot itself be a reason for believing it; rather, we believe it is true because it satisfies other criteria: e.g. it coheres with all our other beliefs and provides the simplest explanation of certain observable phenomena. We consider it reasonable to believe statements that satisfy such criteria; and on that basis we say that these statements are “true”.

There are many other areas where it can be instructive to pose a dilemma of this sort. For example:

Do people do well on intelligence tests because they are intelligent, or are they intelligent [i.e. are they classified as 'intelligent’] because they do well on such tests?

Do we condemn such things as incest and cannibalism because they are wrong, or are they wrong [i.e. are they almost universally thought of as ‘wrong’] because we have condemned them for so long?

Do we perceive the world the way we do because that is how the world is, or is the world the way it is because of how we perceive it?

In each case, the first, essentialist option seems the more natural response; but the second, relativistic option, while seemingly bizarre or paradoxical at first, has its defenders. Moreover, the number of these has increased markedly in modern times. Without question, the essentialist perspective has been dominant within Western philosophy since Plato’s time. But over the past hundred years or so in many areas of philosophy, and in other disciplines also, there has been a general drift away from essentialism towards a more relativistic outlook. Why this has occurred is a fascinating question; but that it has occurred is undeniable. No doubt Plato, like many thinkers today, would thoroughly disapprove of this cultural trend. But the possibility (and even the appeal) of an alternative to essentialism was something he fully recognized and was among the first to examine rigorously.

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