Benquo

If decency is defined by the arbitrary whim of our betters, who are you to prosecute your father?

If the gods love decent things because they are decent, then however we know this, we already know the standard for decency ourselves and can cut out the middleman.

But then Euthyphro should be able to explain the standard.

He can't.

Euthyphro tries a few more times, suggesting that decency is a kind of service to the gods, a kind of trade with the gods.

Each time Socrates gently follows the definition to its consequences, and each time it collapses.

Eventually Euthyphro leaves, saying he is in a hurry.

Socrates' last words are a lament.

You have abandoned me without the understanding I needed for my own defence.

This is usually read as a proto-academic dialogue about definitions.

It is a scene from a civilisation in crisis.

A man is about to use the legal system to destroy his own father on the basis of a concept he cannot define, in a courthouse where another man is about to be destroyed by the same concept.

And the man who cannot define it is not unusual.

He is representative.

It is worth noting the irony that this conversation is itself a good illustration of the sort of just asking questions that angered people enough to prosecute Socrates for indecency.

Athens in the late 5th century had recently become something it had never been before.

The capital of an empire.

This changed what it meant to speak in public.

When Athens was a small city making decisions about its own affairs, leadership among Athenians involved speaking to communicate your perspective on matters of shared concern.

But now that the collective decisions of Athens mattered for a whole lot of other people, those other people were quite naturally going to spend a lot of time thinking about how to get Athenians to decide their way.