assignment one; 3 Arguments of euthyphro copy

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Tallahassee Community College *

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2010

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Philosophy

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Feb 20, 2024

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docx

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The Euthyphro’s first three arguments Assignment one 1/14/24 Euthyphro attempts to explain to Socrates five separate times what piety means, but Socrates does not find any of them to be adequate. The very first explanation that Euthyphro offers to define piety is simply that it is “to prosecute the wrongdoer” (Euthyphro 5e). He is essentially meaning that to be pious is to follow the law and ensure that your fellow citizens are good; impiety would be failure to hold your society accountable to morality. Euthyphro had introduced that idea by saying that piety is what he was doing, prosecuting his father for his wrongs but Socrates did not ask him for “one or two of the many pious actions”, so he discards this definition since he feels it is not one but rather an example. After Socrates told Euthyphro to try again, Euthyphro says that whatever the gods hold dear is pious and what they do not is impious. Socrates begins to state his premises: pious and impious are antonyms, respectively synonymous with the god’s love or hate; his second premise is that the gods are “in a state of discord” and cannot agree. Socrates makes the observation that love and hatred are things that cannot be measured to quantifiably prove right or wrong so the subjective attitudes toward an action are ambiguous. His third premise is that different gods have different ideas of what is right, leading to a disconnect in the god world about what is loved or hated. Socrates refutes his argument by detailing how the god’s differing opinions of just or unjust lead to different gods claiming an action is pious while another god could claim it is impious. In this case, Euthyphro’s definition does not hold up because it is not uniform among all the gods and all actions if there is disagreement on what is considered to be held dear. Euthyphro then adjusts his statement to incorporate only agreement among the gods, so then piety is loved by all gods and impiety is hated by all, anything in between or disagreeable is neither pious nor impious. Socrates begins to talk about how such things are considered and he questions Euthyphro’s explanation of how the gods love. He is asking if the gods love a certain action because it is pious or if the action is pious because it is loved, Euthyphro agrees that the gods love it because of its piety. However, Euthyphro just defined piety as what is loved by the gods, so Socrates then becomes confused because if god-love equated to piety and piety equated to being loved, but if god-loved was so because it is loved by gods, then piety would mean the same, that it is loved by the gods. Socrates again thinks this is a trait of piety, and there must be another intrinsic factor that is making it pious in the first place to be loved. He has a difficult time saying that an action loved by the gods is pious because he believes that is simply an aspect or quality of piety and discards his definition once again.
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