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Among the 120 sessions taking place at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival, we’ll be asking: Can the Socratic dialogues help us navigate ethics today? After all, while the living conditions of the ancient Greeks were different to those we experience today, some questions about ‘doing the right thing’ have an eternal quality.
Here, session speaker David Perks examines the question of piety and, whatever it is, could we do with a little more of it at a time when everyone seems to want to display their moral virtue?
What could reading Plato’s dialogue, the Euthyphro, have to do with debates about virtue signalling on social media?
When I first read Euthyphro, I had no idea that there was any connection. I was just trying to work out what Socrates was doing. His ethical enquiry into how to live a good life was still slowly revealing itself.
But this dialogue gave me a jolt. Morality isn’t something we are comfortable discussing. I am far more used to expressing opinions on politics – the cut and thrust of arguments about who should rule us and what they are arguing for. But Socrates is asking questions about things we hardly know the meaning of today, like piety.
I’ll be honest, until I read Euthyphro, I don’t think I had ever given piety much thought. I was only vaguely aware of what it meant to be pious. I thought it referred to being devoutly religious – not something I bothered about much as an atheist.
However, Socrates used it in another sense. He was questioning Euthyphro’s attempt to prosecute his own father for the alledged murder of a slave. It was in the sense of turning on his own family that Socrates challenged Euthyphro. Piety was, in this sense, honouring your family. Socrates challenged Euthyphro to explain piety as he must know what it was if he was bringing his father to court for a crime so heinous that he was prepared to destroy him.
And so the dialogue was an inquiry into the meaning of piety. They arrived at the idea that piety must be what ‘all’ the gods love – remembering that Greek gods had a propensity to argue with each other. However, Socrates was not completely satisfied with this.
Socrates added another question. Is being pious what all the gods love or do the gods love what is pious? Have we really discovered what piety is? This is Euthyphro’s dilemma. Both Euthyphro and Socrates seemed stumped to know how to resolve the dilemma. Neither could say what piety really is. This is the famous Socratic ignorance or aporia. Socrates did not resolve the meaning of piety, but he made it plain that Euthyphro’s certainty of his own belief in the meaning of piety was unfounded.
Socrates was really asking whether Euthyphro knew what he was doing trying to prosecute his father when his crime was not at all clear. Euthyphro made his excuses and left to presumably pursue his court case, although we don’t know how that ended.
So, there is another negative sense of being pious. That of publicly expressing insincere virtue. Being seen to do the ‘right’ thing, as Euthyphro might say it before the ‘gods’. Euthyphro’s public demonstration of his virtue in bringing a case against his own father is a pretty extreme case of such a pious act. If his case succeeded, it would almost certainly result in his father’s death.
So, does this have echoes within our society? Can we learn anything from Socrates’s questioning of Euthyphro’s moral certainty about his belief of his own piety?
We seem to be all too eager to demonstrate that we believe in the ‘right’ thing and show this off publicly. In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and the reaction to his brutal killing by the police in the US, public demonstrations of opposition to racism became almost a mandatory act – from the #BlackOutTuesday hashtag on the social-media accounts of major brands to witnessing everyone from Keir Starmer to Premier League football clubs bending the knee.
But did this mass virtue signalling amount to anything more than demonstrations of insincere virtue? Were we demonstrating to our ‘gods’, our moral virtue? But now time has passed and we don’t seem to be as keen to profess our moral purity by calling for the police to be defunded. Instead, we seem to be constantly searching for new causes and ribbons to wear. Is this modern piety displayed on social media any different to Euthyphro’s demonstration in the agora before the ‘gods’ of ancient Athens?
David Perks is retired head teacher who now runs the Classical Philosophy Reading Group. You can watch videos of the group’s previous discussions on YouTube. He will also be speaking in the session The Odyssey: cinematic sensation or sin against the Greeks?
I am interested in the psychological characteristics & motivation of people prone to to publicly expressing insincere virtue in able to be seen to do the ‘right’ thing.