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Philosophy and Literature, Volume 38, Number 2, October 2014, pp.

510-527 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/phl.2014.0065

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/phl/summary/v038/38.2.garver.html

Access provided by Monash University Library (10 Apr 2016 08:15 GMT)
Eugene Garver

Euthyphro Prosecutes a
Human Rights Violation

Abstract. Socrates encounters Euthyphro as both are on their way

to court, Socrates as a defendant against charges of blasphemy and
Euthyphro as a prosecutor of his father for negligently causing the death
of a slave—a human rights violation. While I argue that piety and pol-
lution supply a productive way of thinking about human rights crime
and punishment, Euthyphro is a very troubling model for the human
rights prosecutor, since he is an almost paradigmatically unattractive
character. Reading the Euthyphro leads to appropriately troubling and
ambivalent feelings about contemporary human rights prosecutions.

S ocrates encounters Euthyphro as both are on their way to court,

Socrates as a defendant against charges of blasphemy and Euthyphro
to prosecute his father for negligently causing the death of a slave. I want
to investigate what happens if we were to follow the drama of Euthyphro
and recast human rights violations as violations of piety rather than jus-
tice, and the prosecutions not as calls for punishments but the removal
of pollution. Piety and pollution are not in the current vocabulary for
talking about human rights, but the problems Euthyphro and Socrates
encounter have evident analogues today. Euthyphro, though, is a very
troubling model for the human rights prosecutor. Reading Euthyphro
leads to appropriately ambivalent feelings about contemporary human
rights prosecutions.
I start with a quick summary of Euthyphro, highlighting the ways in
which Euthyphro’s actions and Socrates’s questions about them raise
issues analogous to contemporary human rights prosecutions. Socrates

Philosophy and Literature, 2014, 38: 510–527. © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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asks Euthyphro whom he’s prosecuting and why, and is surprised that
Euthyphro is prosecuting his own father. Euthyphro’s response tells us
almost all we know about the case:

I am amused, Socrates, at your making a distinction between one who is

a relation and one who is not a relation; for surely the pollution is the
same in either case, if you knowingly associate with the murderer when
you ought to clear yourself and him by proceeding against him. The real
question is whether the murdered man has been justly slain. If justly,
then your duty is to let the matter alone; but if unjustly, then even if the
murderer lives under the same roof with you and eats at the same table,
proceed against him. Now the man who is dead was a poor dependent
of mine who worked for us as a field labourer on our farm in Naxos, and
one day in a fit of drunken passion he got into a quarrel with one of our
domestic servants and slew him. My father bound him hand and foot
and threw him into a ditch, and then sent to Athens to ask of a diviner
what he should do with him. Meanwhile he never attended to him and
took no care about him, for he regarded him as a murderer; and thought
that no great harm would be done even if he did die. Now this was just
what happened. For such was the effect of cold and hunger and chains
upon him, that before the messenger returned from the diviner, he was
dead. And my father and family are angry with me for taking the part of
the murderer and prosecuting my father. They say that he did not kill
him, and that if he did, the dead man was but a murderer, and I ought
not to take any notice, for that a son is impious who prosecutes a father.
Which shows, Socrates, how little they know what the gods think about
piety and impiety. (4b–e)1

Euthyphro intends to remove the pollution (miasma) both from himself

and from his father. As Samuel Scolnicov puts it, “To [Euthyphro’s]
mind, this is an act of piety, namely, the redemption of the blood of
him who has no redeemer.”2 I can think of no better description of the
purpose of prosecuting human rights violations.
Before going on, I need to add two points of Athenian law. First,
both Socrates’s trial and Euthyphro’s take place before the archon. In
Athenian law, blasphemy and homicide were equally matters of piety,
not justice, to be adjudicated by the archon rather than the king. The
relationship between piety and justice becomes a focus as the dialogue
progresses, but initially piety and justice simply refer to two different
kinds of courts.
Second, Athenian law had no public prosecutors, so the situation
resembles today’s predicament in which it is up for debate just who
512 Philosophy and Literature

should prosecute putative human rights violations. Euthyphro’s family

and others who object to the prosecution say that anyone but Euthyphro
should prosecute the father; Euthyphro plausibly contends that if he
doesn’t do it, no one else will.
Back to the details of Euthyphro’s narrative. Euthyphro is prosecut-
ing his father for something that occurred at a distant place and time.
The alleged crime took place in Naxos. Since Athens lost Naxos in 404
BCE, and Socrates’s own trial took place in 399, the death of the worker
must have taken place at least five years before Euthyphro prosecutes his
father. Also, because the crime happened in Naxos, not Athens, the case
is analogous to Pinochet’s prosecution in Spain, or a Liberian torturer’s
in Atlanta. An even better parallel are the prosecutions of Argentine
and South African former officials by their democratic successors, which
is similar to a child prosecuting a father. Moreover, in Greek law, the
prosecutor is always in a sense on trial too. If the accuser fails to win
his case, he is punished. Here too is a similarity between Euthyphro’s
position and that of contemporary human rights prosecutors who are
also symbolically on trial.3
A further parallel: for both Euthyphro and contemporary human
rights law, the actions of the victim are irrelevant. Provocations cannot
justify violations of human rights. It’s still genocide even if the Jews
are sucking Poland dry and Asians in Uganda are doing the same, if
Armenians are a fifth column in Turkey and the Chinese in Indonesia,
or if some suspect might have been involved in the 9/11 bombings.
Those accusations are as irrelevant as, according to Euthyphro, the fact
that the slave left to die by Euthyphro’s father was himself a murderer.
In human rights prosecutions, what matters is not the innocence of
the victims but their powerlessness. Human rights prosecutions do not
simply go after those who have violated human rights but those who
have done so with impunity.
Human rights prosecutions, like all prosecutions, encounter problems
relating the universal to the particular. Euthyphro can justify the pros-
ecution of his father by showing that it falls under a general rule that
the guilty should always be punished. This justification fails to address
why Euthyphro conducts the prosecution and why, among all the people
who mistreat their slaves or other noncitizens, he should single out
his father for prosecution. Euthyphro is selective in his human rights
prosecution. Such selectivity is inevitable and not automatically unjust.
One can correct one instance of wrongdoing without being committed
to correcting all the wrongs in the world.
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Such selectivity is the counterpart of the particularity of love. No

matter how many characteristics of the beloved one lists, in principle
more than one person can always fit the bill, and someone else might
better satisfy that list than the beloved.4 The difference is that the lover
is rarely called out to explain his or her choice; “why not me?” is not a
question with much purchase, unless the point is to insinuate that I’m
marrying Monica for her money. If someone were to ask why Saddam
Hussein’s crimes are worth a war, or Slobodan Milošević’s worth a
trial, it would be fair to ask, “Why not Charles Taylor?” (Charles Taylor
the Liberian dictator, not Charles Taylor the Canadian philosopher.)
“Because Iraq has lots of oil” and “because Yugoslavia is in Europe” are
not appropriate answers—they correspond to loving someone because
she is rich, or available.5 Human rights prosecutions, as in Euthyphro’s
case, are doubly selective, both in whom to prosecute and in who does
the prosecuting. Selectivity is not a concern for piety as it is for justice.
Euthyphro does exactly what one must do in such a situation: he
doesn’t offer a logical proof that his action is right—that’s impossible
because one cannot demonstrate that exactly one particular, but no
other, follows from a general principle, and because attempts to do so
always look like special pleading or hypocrisy. Instead he must demon-
strate the rightness of his action by an argument from his character,
his êthos: “This prosecution is right because I’m the sort of person who
does right things.”
Thus his first definition: “I say that piety is doing what I am doing
now, prosecuting the wrongdoer who commits murder or steals from
the temples or does any such thing, whether he be your father or your
mother or anyone else, and not prosecuting him is impious” (5d). That
answer is appropriate; it is an ethical definition of piety, ethical in the
sense that it reveals Euthyphro’s character. The definition defines piety
and the pious: anyone who is pious will understand and assent to this
characterization. To raise further questions about it would show bad
breeding and would violate decorum, getting close to violating piety
itself. As Nietzsche observed in what could be taken as a commentary on
piety, Socrates has such bad manners that his behavior is impertinent,
itself a form of impiety. Violations of decorum are impious.6
In this case, though, Euthyphro’s ethical definition and argument
are unsuccessful. It might appear that Socrates rejects Euthyphro’s
ethical definition of piety by insisting on a logical one instead; his lines
of questioning seem to call for the logical definition of necessary and
sufficient conditions that people after Socrates have adopted as the only
514 Philosophy and Literature

sort of definition appropriate to philosophy and law. Instead Socrates

tests Euthyphro’s êthos by showing that he hasn’t thought through what
he’s doing. Euthyphro’s êthos is not sufficiently informed by reasoning.
That is how selectivity in human rights prosecutions opens to charges
of hypocrisy, hidden motives, and tu quoque arguments. What is needed
are ethical arguments.7
Euthyphro does give a proof (tekmêrion) that “piety is what I’m doing
right now.” That proof consists in showing that Zeus punished his own
father (5e). Imitating the gods is in many ways the crux of piety and
impiety. Euthyphro thinks he’s behaving piously because he acts as Zeus
did; others see that as grounds for accusing him of impiety.8
Euthyphro lacks seriousness. To do something as radical as prosecut-
ing one’s own father for pollution requires more character than the
minimal requirement of clean hands. Euthyphro says that his father’s
act caused miasma (4b10), but Euthyphro doesn’t act like someone
who feels himself polluted. Pollution for him is a simple fact unrelated
to his own experience. For one to remove the pollution of an impiety
without committing another act of impiety oneself, one needs an êthos
of sacrifice.9 Socrates never questions Euthyphro’s motives; he doesn’t
have to. He demands not clean hands but consciousness of the gravity
of his actions.
Euthyphro says that people think him crazy to prosecute his father
(4a). Socrates is shocked (4a–b), but implies that the prosecution would
be all right if the father had murdered someone in the family (4b4). The
uselessness of universal moral ideas is reflected in Euthphyro’s family’s
alternative accusations: “They say that he did not kill him, and if he
had killed him never so much, yet since the dead man was a murderer,
I ought not to trouble myself with such a fellow, because it is impious
for a son to prosecute his father for murder” (4e). Euthyphro could
be at fault because it is he who is doing the prosecuting, because he is
prosecuting his father, or because his father’s victim was a slave and/or
a murderer. Socrates and Euthyphro will later (8b–c) agree that there is
consensus on general rules and only dispute about their application,
but the reactions to Euthyphro’s action casts into doubt that universal/
particular distinction. The true universals here are the character of the
participants and the true particulars their decisions.
Two things make Euthyphro’s prosecution of his father shocking and
maybe impious, and both bear on contemporary human rights prosecu-
tions. The point of human rights prosecutions is to establish the rule of
law where it does not exist. Therefore, as the Euthyphro shows, they upset
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existing relations of equality and inequality, and constitute an invasion

of privacy or of sovereign immunity. Euthyphro violates a boundary
between public and private—private here meaning within some entity
shielded from public scrutiny and judgment. Matters between an owner
and a slave, between slaves, and between fathers and sons belong in the
household, not a public court.
Euthyphro treats his father as the leader of a failed state: since he was
not able to regulate crime and punishment in his own domain, outside
intervention is justified. Euthyphro’s act is scandalous, and maybe impi-
ous, because it turns something within the family into something public.
It is scandalous because it humanizes and politicizes slaves. Human rights
are rights possessed by people apart from their place in any political
community. The prosecution of human rights violations therefore brings
into a public, adjudicative sphere matters that are otherwise private. A
prosecution is always therefore impertinent.
In different ways, terror, torture, and human rights prosecutions all
change the boundary between public and private. Terror makes “private
citizens” into combatants. Hamas and Hezbollah are quite explicit about
this: since all Israeli citizens are illegitimately occupying Palestinian ter-
ritory, they are all legitimate targets. Torture invades the privacy of the
body. And human rights prosecutions invade what is otherwise sovereign
territory, either of a slave owner or a failed state. Calling something a
“failed state” is a way of ignoring the tension between an international
legal system of state autonomy and one of individual human rights. That
is just what Euthyphro’s family objects to.
Piety preserves hierarchy; impiety violates it.10 When Euthyphro next
unsuccessfully defines piety as what pleases the gods (6e), he raises the
question of how one is supposed to act toward a superior, whether his
father, the gods, or, in Socrates’s case, the state. When a human rights
violator is prosecuted, a national leader or other person in authority—at
least with enough power to commit serious harms—becomes a figure
equal before the law. To force someone to stand before the law is to
be superior to that person. Therefore any human rights prosecution
appears impious. In order to prosecute someone for a human rights
violation, one must be powerful. Therefore such prosecution looks
like nothing but the manifestation of power: “can” implies “ought.”
The moral ambiguity of a human rights prosecution, the reason it is
represented by a cycle of impieties in Euthyphro, is that we use unequal
power to restore or establish equal power.
516 Philosophy and Literature

When they meet, Socrates is on his way to his trial. But the dialogue
does not indicate whether Euthyphro is going to or from court. His
impiety, if he is impious, consists not in punishing his father but in
prosecuting him, making family matters public, undermining his father’s
authority and sovereignty within the household. Human rights prosecu-
tions, not punishments, remove the pollution of rights violations. As
David Luban remarks:

The curious feature about ICL [international criminal law] is that in it

the emphasis shifts from punishments to trials. Thus it is often said that
the goal of ICL lies in promoting social reconciliation, giving victims a
voice, or making a historical record of mass atrocities to help secure the
past against deniers and revisionists. The legitimacy of these goals can
be questioned, because they seem extrinsic to purely legal values. But
what is often overlooked is that, legitimate or not, they are goals of trials,
not punishments. Indeed, the punishment of the guilty seems almost an
afterthought (not to them, of course).11

Socrates never accuses Euthyphro of impiety, only of lack of serious-

ness. Socrates focuses on the ethical gap between facile definitions of
piety and the particular decision to prosecute. The selective nature
of any human rights prosecution and any action such as Euthyphro’s
leads Socrates next to note that discussion of certain matters causes
hatred and anger, even among the gods (7b–d). Socrates’s observation
looks like a digression from the real business of defining piety, but the
relation between disagreement and its emotional responses is central
to the nature of piety, and the observation occurs at the very center of
the dialogue.
Earlier, Socrates showed that he was the object of anger and hatred
because others took him as a model (3d); he is threatening, while
Euthyphro is absurd and so can be dismissed. Now Socrates points to
subjects disagreement about which causes hatred and anger. How the
disagreement is conducted is not important but rather what the disagree-
ment is about. These are subjects where the universal/particular distinc-
tion—we all agree the guilty ought to be punished; the only question
is whether Euthyphro’s father is guilty—doesn’t do what it promises. If
you’re going to do something as mad as prosecute your father, or fail
to do so, I doubt you agree with me on any supposedly shared moral
principles, such as that the guilty should be punished. Ethical universals,
such as principles of justice, do no ethical work.
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There is a connection between the objects of discussion and the

drama of the discussion in Euthyphro. Socrates presents one alterna-
tive to differences that cause enmity and anger: differences that can
be resolved through measurement. The drama of Euthyphro presents
another: Euthyphro himself. His differences with others cause them to
laugh at him, not hate him, contrary to his intentions, just as Socrates
causes hatred contrary to his. Differences no longer cause hatred and
anger if they are differences between propositions, or if there are dif-
ferences among people who do not feel themselves to be in conflict.
The named alternative is measurement and consequent agreement. The
exemplified difference is one that remains, doesn’t get resolved, because
there is no felt need to remove the difference. The only example given
for this possibility is Euthyphro’s lack of seriousness.
There is a perfect match between piety, the subject of the Euthyphro,
and its two characters. Piety consists in treating serious matters seriously,
something Euthyphro himself is unable to do. Piety is a virtue for treat-
ing disagreements and conflicts, since so many instances of piety are at
the same time examples of impiety. The difference between Socrates
and Euthyphro exemplifies the ambiguous nature of piety.
This difference between the two characters emerges first at 3c, where
Socrates says that Athenians don’t mind someone being clever, but
object to his teaching others to be the same. What is all right for some
shouldn’t be universalized; foolishness, cleverness, innovation are not
dangerous as long as they are not contagious. Socrates reverses this and
claims that it is only right for him to do something if anyone should
do it. Socrates’s perceived cleverness is taken as a form of impiety, a
lack of respect for custom and norms. The issue in Socrates’s own trial
is whether cleverness pollutes the community or is a victimless error.
Where Euthyphro is ridiculous, Socrates causes anger (3c–d).12 One is
eccentric, the other is a threat.
Euthyphro is what Holmes in Abrams (250 U.S. 616 [1919]) called
a “poor and puny anonymity,” while the majority in that case see the
communists, like Socrates, as threats. In the Apology Socrates defends
himself by appealing to his daimonion, but instead of claiming that
this makes him a divine favorite, he reinterprets the Delphic oracle to
mean that there is nothing unique about him. So long as people act
like Euthyphro, they are ridiculous. When they start to act like Socrates,
they become threatening. Euthyphro is an example of difference that
does not become conflict, while Socrates exemplifies how differences
become conflicts. If Euthyphro isn’t serious enough to be pious, Socrates
518 Philosophy and Literature

is too serious. Socrates is impious because he confesses that he knows

nothing (6a–b), Euthyphro because he thinks he knows more than
others about the gods.
Plato makes reading Euthyphro as an allegory for contemporary human
rights prosecutions difficult and ethically ambiguous. Euthyphro sounds
like a contemporary talk show host, with the same combination of self-
confidence and invincible ignorance. He even talks about himself in the
third person (4e9). He thinks that his fluent talk means that he knows
what he’s talking about. While friendly, his self-confidence prevents him
from being able to listen to anyone else. Like the talk show host, he has
no interest in the victims or perpetrators of human rights violations; he
is only interested in showing his own superiority and making a name for
himself. Those skeptical of contemporary institutions for human rights
prosecutions say the same thing.
Seeing Euthyphro as a human rights prosecutor should be troubling.
The reader shares the verdict with Euthyphro’s family that he is a ludi-
crous figure. Like a comic character, his name—“a right thinker”—means
the opposite of who he is.13 In Philebus Socrates tells Protarchus that two
qualities make a character laughable: the ignorance of thinking that
the character has something valuable which in fact he does not have
(48c2)—in this case, knowledge of the gods and their likes and dislikes;
and weakness (astheneia) (49b7), which makes character ridiculous
rather than threatening.14
But Euthyphro is not simply comic. In deep ways, Euthyphro, like many
of the characters in Plato’s dialogues, is Socrates’s double, especially in
Euthyphro’s own eyes. He links himself and Socrates together (3c3–4).
He too doesn’t mind being unpopular (“people resent everyone like
us” [3b]), and both violate decorum. Euthyphro unintentionally makes
himself look ridiculous; Socrates (intentionally?) makes others look
ridiculous.15 Euthyphro compares his own prophetic gifts with Socrates’s
daimonion. Both of them fly from particulars. Euthyphro prosecutes a
human rights violation by stripping away accidental details that the mur-
derer is his father, that the victim is a slave. That is just how someone—
Euthyphro or Socrates—becomes a gadfly or policeman to the world.
Meletus will rid the city of its corruption through indicting Socrates
(2c–d), while Euthyphro will rid himself and his family of its pollution
through indicting his father. Socrates in other dialogues declares himself
invulnerable to other people’s acts of injustice; Euthyphro is invulner-
able to argument. Socrates is humble but insists that others become like
him. Euthyphro would be disappointed if others were like him, since he
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needs to stand out. Euthyphro thinks that someone must be very clever
to do something as exceptional as what he’s doing.16
The centrality of angry disagreement makes piety different from the
other virtues. In The Republic, for example, long before the characters
agree on a definition, they do agree that an act can have the appear-
ance of justice or injustice without the reality. But for piety a single act
can appear both as pious and impious, and the dialogue develops no
distinction between appearance and reality. Euthyphro’s initial examples
were a series of behaviors, not mental states. There is no evidence in the
Euthyphro that piety, like other virtues, has an inner life. Instead we have
to master a field of conflicting appearances where differences cannot
be settled by an appeal to a truer reality behind them. Euthyphro’s act
is both pious in trying to remove pollution from himself and his father,
and impious in prosecuting his own father. It seems that Socrates is
impious because he doesn’t accept traditional stories about the gods;
Euthyphro is impious because he does accept them (6a). There is no
example to which one can point, as one can to Achilles for courage,
Pericles for practical wisdom.
Piety cannot be set off from justice in a single definitive way, and it
shouldn’t be. Initially piety and justice were simply the names for two
kinds of violations that put people under the jurisdiction of two dif-
ferent courts. Piety is not in the first instance an offense against the
gods; recall once more Euthyphro’s first definition of piety: “I say that
piety is doing what I am doing now, prosecuting the wrongdoer who
commits murder or steals from the temples or does any such thing.”
It becomes an offense against the gods as the dialogue develops. Only
after Euthyphro is completely confused by Socrates’s question of
whether something is pious because it pleases the gods or whether the
gods approve of something because it is pious does Socrates finally ask
Euthyphro whether the pious is what is right (to dikaion) or only a part
of what is right (12a). Only then (12e) does Euthyphro finally claim
that “the part of the right which has to do with attention to the gods
constitutes piety,” as opposed to service to other men.
Euthyphro arguably acts both piously to remove pollution and impi-
ously by prosecuting his father.17 The fact that he is correcting one act
of impiety doesn’t mean that he isn’t committing another one. If he
does wrong by prosecuting his father, that fact does not put his father
in the right. Euthyphro is not the only character in classical literature
who is both pious and impious.
520 Philosophy and Literature

In one way Socrates and Euthyphro are doubles, Socrates a satyr (see
Symposium 215–216) and Euthyphro a comic figure. Euthyphro has a
tragic double as well: Orestes. Orestes too removes the pollution by
avenging his father’s murder, and at the same time acts impiously and
becomes polluted by murdering his mother. Orestes is a tragic figure,
while Euthyphro is merely absurd. The challenge for comedy and
Socratic dialogues alike is to insure that the audience, while recogniz-
ing characters like Euthyphro as worse than we are, does not respond
with a smugness of moral superiority. 18
Too often in contemporary philosophy, conflicts of values are thought
to lead immediately to tragic situations, which would seem on Aristotle’s
terms to overpopulate the world with people who are better than we.19
In Euthyphro conflict between competing claims of rightness leads to
comedy. Therefore something more than a conflict of values is needed
for a situation to be tragic. Euthyphro thinks that if his father has done
something wrong, his own action must be right. That way of thinking
is common, and often correct. The state, or a parent, inflicts pain on
a wrongdoer. The wrongdoer has created a situation where what is
otherwise wrong becomes right. So Euthyphro argues. Once his father
has become a murderer, he should be considered a murderer, not a
father, so that prosecuting him becomes the right thing to do. In tragedy
that common inference doesn’t work. Clytemnestra is a murderer, but
that doesn’t stop her from being Orestes’s mother. His mother being
a wrongdoer doesn’t prevent Orestes from doing wrong at the same
time he does right.20
Euthyphro and Orestes dramatize the problem of human rights pros-
ecutions and of the correction of impiety. Each is unable to remove a
pollution without himself becoming a polluter. Earlier I said that terror,
torture, and human rights prosecutions, in different ways, change the
boundaries between the public and private. But they are not all on the
same moral plane. Unlike human rights prosecutions, torture and terror
are deliberate acts of impiety. When torture is a response to terror, the
terrorist makes a deliberate decision to be impious in retaliation: thus,
desecrations of the Koran and sexual humiliations. Euthyphro dramatizes
the cycle of impieties, while the similar cycle ends with Orestes only
because of the deus ex machina of Athena’s jury tampering. And in one
regard, Euthyphro more closely typifies today’s human rights prosecutions
than the tragic representations of Orestes: Euthyphro’s father’s crime
is a more typical human rights violation than that of Orestes’s mother,
since neglecting a slave is not socially deviant but acceptable and normal.
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Within Euthyphro, the character of Euthyphro is a comic figure,

Socrates tragic. Socrates personifies his own observation about ethi-
cal differences leading to emotional conflicts, represented by his own
relations to his accusers and Athenian citizens in general, while for
Euthyphro differences can exist without conflict because he is oblivi-
ous to them. He notices that his family is angry with him, but he is too
clever to get angry with the family members. The jurisdictional argu-
ments about human rights prosecutions are disputes about whether a
difference involves a conflict of pleas to be resolved by law. The violator
will simply assert that actions within the state are no one’s business,
and so we should let differences stand; the prosecutor who claims that
crimes against human rights trigger universal jurisdiction converts the
difference into a conflict.
Now we can move from Euthyphro the comic character to Euthyphro
as a dialogue with a comic plot. Euthyphro starts from an understand-
ing of piety as what pleases the gods, and his examples are “prosecuting
the wrongdoer who commits murder or steals from the temples or does
any such thing.” Acting piously or impiously is not necessarily acting
toward the gods. It is any behavior the gods approve or disapprove. As
the dialogue advances, piety becomes more and more a direct relation
between people and gods. First piety is what pleases the gods. When
we learn that something might please some gods and anger others,
Euthyphro needs a new definition. He takes the fact that the same thing
pleases some gods and angers others as a flaw in his definition instead
of an indication of the nature of piety. He cannot see the conflict built
into the nature of piety because he maintains that his father’s impiety
gives him immunity from accusations of impiety. He rejects the “tragic”
characterization. He prefers Socrates’s alternative (9d) that all the gods
like what is pious. The focus of attention moves to the gods themselves
as Socrates asks whether something pleases the gods because it is pious
or the other way around (10a).
The question and its development frustrate Euthyphro. His first
response is “I don’t know what you mean, Socrates” (10a), and his
last is “I do not know how to say what I mean” (11b). Finally, agreeing
with Socrates that the pious is part of the right, just as it is part of the
frightening, Euthyphro claims that piety is that part of the right which
has to do with the gods. Whether the rightness of a law or an action is
inherent or depends on its authority is a question that goes nowhere
in Euthyphro. In spite of its popularity in Christian theology, I wonder
whether Euthyphro isn’t right to dismiss the question. We shouldn’t
522 Philosophy and Literature

have to choose between intrinsic rightness and justification through

authority, between logos and êthos.
Euthyphro as comedy points to a further, troubling, facet of human
rights prosecutions. I have stressed the way prosecuting impiety often
involves an act of impiety, and removing pollution involves a further
act of pollution. Comic figures such as Euthyphro are ridiculous, but
the human rights violators surely are not. Aristotle says that the comic
consists in bad things that are not harmful (Poetics 5.1449a35). Human
rights violations are harmful, but that is not what makes them salient.
They are offenses and outrages. Common Article III of the Geneva
Convention prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular
humiliating and degrading treatment” as well as “violence to life and
person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment
and torture.”21
We prosecute human rights violations not only because of the harm
they have done but because of their grotesque qualities. Focusing on
harm alone provokes questions of comparative numbers: more Americans
die in traffic accidents each year than in the World Trade Center attacks.
The barbarity of crimes against humanity is something quite distinct
from the harms those crimes perpetrate. The argument that since we
could kill this person, a fortiori we have the right to torture him, has
no ethical purchase, although it survived for a long time as a justifi-
cation for slavery. Accusations of rape, cannibalism, poison gas show
that pollution as a category remains in our emotional imagination.22
Domestic crimes don’t have to injure the state to be crimes against the
state; we don’t have to prove that a putative crime against humanity
somehow damages humanity. Just as the terrorist and the torturer are
mirror images of each other, so too can be the human rights violator
and prosecutor, Euthyphro and his father, Socrates and Euthyphro.
Impiety can be anything from a breach of decorum to barbarism as a
breach of civilization.23
The final characterization of piety—that it is the art of exchange with
the gods—gets Euthyphro into final trouble. First, calling piety an art
returns to his initial idea that piety requires superior knowledge, and
not superior character. Second, asking what the gods want, or what
people can do that is good for the gods, brings back the question, which
human rights prosecutions share with all acts of punishment, of what
good is served.24 Attention or service to the gods becomes the subject
of the dialogue from 12e on. Acts of piety are good without being good
for anyone, which is why Euthyphro’s idea of piety as exchange with
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the gods is itself impious. Nothing is made better by a prosecution of

Pinochet. Many South African victims of apartheid complained that
they weren’t interested in justice but in economic opportunity. Actions
that are their own end are pointless or gratuitous. Both human rights
violations and their prosecution are gratuitous. Piety consists in grace-
fully being grateful to the gods.25 Justice always serves some further
purpose, whether of the community or individuals. Theories of justice
always have trouble with the idea of retribution, precisely because that
idea serves no further good. Retribution is better understood as a form
of piety, removing pollution. Euthyphro is a reminder that there is more
to life, even to international law, than justice. Retributive accounts of
criminal punishment insist that it is wrong to use punishing someone
to further some other end.26
This is why there are advantages to thinking of a human rights violation
as a removal of pollution, and as an act of piety and reverence rather
than justice. The center of attention in restorative piety is the polluter,
not the victim. As mentioned earlier, the act or character of the victim
is irrelevant to the nature of the polluting act. In addition, restorative
piety, like love, is in a certain respect gratuitous, not to be measured by
its benefits. We can’t love everyone, and we can’t be policemen to the
world. Yet the fact that we can’t do everything does not diminish the
obligation and value of acting piously when we can. Toward the end of
the dialogue, in the redefinition of piety as service to the gods, Euthyphro
puzzles over the fact that the gods, being self-sufficient, need nothing.
Piety is a paradigm of gratuitous, and graceful, action.
In one respect, Euthyphro is superior to Socrates as a model for piety.
Euthyphro inadvertently shows one way to differ from others without
causing hatred and anger, while Socrates is the exemplar of differences
causing conflicts. Euthyphro can be different without causing anger
because he is the object of ridicule instead; he is perceived as too weak
to be a threat. Euthyphro is ridiculous, while Socrates the object of hate,
because he teaches others to do the same. Taken together, Euthyphro
and Socrates show the advantages and disadvantages of conflict and
conflict avoidance.
Euthyphro is an inconclusive dialogue in a much more profound sense
than usually recognized. It is inconclusive only if we expect, and do not
get, a resolution of the sort that Euthyphro thinks he can provide. The
interplay between Socrates and Euthyphro raises the question of what the
êthos must be—whether of a nation or an individual—to conduct human
rights prosecutions or defenses without oneself violating human rights,
524 Philosophy and Literature

to remove pollution without oneself creating a new offense. Euthyphro

is Socrates’s double; human rights prosecutions are the mirror image
of human rights violations.27

Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota

1.  This quotation is from Jowett’s translation, modified. Plato’s “Euthyphro,” “Apology of
Socrates” and “Crito,” ed. with notes by John Burnet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924);
hereafter referred to by Stephanus pagination in the text. “Euthyphro . . . is bringing a
charge of homicide (phonos), and that fell within the competence of the basileus, since
the state only took cognizance of homicide in so far as it created a religion pollution
(agos, miasma) which would affect the whole community unless it were purged (cf. 4c1).
Apart from this, phonos was a private wrong which concerned primarily the family of
the slain. From that point of view, it might have seemed appropriate that it should be
dealt with by the Archon rather than the King; for matters of family law fell within the
Archon’s competence. The religious view prevails; but even so phonos was never treated
as an offence against the state in the strict sense. If it had been, the procedure would
have been by graphê (see 2a5n), and it would have been open to any Athenian citizen
to institute a prosecution for it, whereas the right to prosecute for phonos was confined
to near relatives of the slain man, or, in the case of a slave, his master.” (p. 3)
I refer to the person who dies through negligence as a slave. That isn’t quite correct.
He was a laborer with relationship of economic dependence on Euthyphro, but no legal
protection from him. He was a pelatés, a worker and a dependent of Euthyphro’s who
was neither a citizen nor a slave. Slaves had some indirect legal protection, since they
were property of a master, who could take action to defend his property, but a pelatés
was truly powerless, having no legal standing himself and having no one to whom he
was legally bound. If the victims of human rights violations are the most powerless, then
once again Euthyphro’s indictment serves as a perfect paradigm.
2. Samuel Scolnicov, “Plato on Education as the Development of Reason,” www.bu.edu/
wcp/Papers/Anci/AnciScol.htm.
3.  For details of the contemporary human rights movement, see Samuel Moyn, The
Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2010).
4.  Plato explores these issues for friendship in Lysis. I have discussed them in Eugene
Garver, “The Rhetoric of Friendship in Plato’s Lysis,” Rhetorica 24 (2006): 117–36.
5.  For an argument defending “oil” as an answer, see Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent:
The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2008).
6.  Euthyphro and Socrates are both located in the space Marcel Detienne calls Between
Belief and Transgression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Mary Douglas, Purity
and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan
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Paul, 1978) provides the canonical argument that dirt, i.e., pollution, consists of things
violating boundaries and being out of place. There is therefore an irreducibly conven-
tional element to piety. Herodotus’s observation that different cultures are shocked at
one another’s burial practices serves as an example.
7. I develop this idea of ethical arguments in Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Rheoric: An Art
of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) and Eugene Garver, For the Sake
of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
8.  Paul Woodruff, “Reverence without Theology: Universal Humanism?” Religious
Humanism 37 (2006): 17–31: “Hubris is the vice of arrogance. It is the vice that shows
itself most blatantly when a king thinks he’s a god and can get away with what gods do
in Greek mythology. And reverence is the countervailing virtue” (21). See too Plato,
Republic II 378b.
9.  Talad Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003): “The term homo sacer was used for someone who, as the result of
a curse (sacer esto), became an outlaw liable to be killed by anyone with impunity. Thus
while the sacredness of property dedicated to a god made it inviolable, the sacredness
of homo sacer made him eminently subject to violence” (p. 30).
10.  Paul W. Kahn, Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2008): “Humanitarian law is a deeply paradoxical enterprise, for it
brings a structure of reciprocity to an essentially asymmetrical activity. As a set of legal
rules, humanitarian law demands that each side in a conflict recognize the same rights
and duties. But combat, as an activity of killing and being killed, moves according to a
logic of asymmetry: each side seeks the advantage. Given this tension between the sym-
metry of legal reciprocity and the asymmetry of warfare, humanitarian law could proceed
only by building an idea of ‘the warrior’s honor,’ which understands the battlefield as an
autonomous domain with its own practices and norms. Those practices can have only
culturally specific valences. . . . That combatants can injure and kill but not torture each
other is a remnant of the code of chivalry maintained by the ethos of an aristocratic
class—the class that later supplied officers” (pp. 61–62). See too George Orwell, “Revenge
Is Sour,” www.orwell.ru/library/articles/revenge/english/e_revso.
11.  David Luban, “Fairness to Rightness: Jurisdiction, Legality and the Legitimacy
of International Criminal Law,” The Philosophy of International Law (2010): 569–88.
See too Robert D. Sloane, “The Expressive Capacity of International Punishment,”
Stanford International Law Journal 43 (2007): 37–74. Sloane quotes William A. Schabas,
“International Sentencing from Leipzig (1923) to Arusha (1996),” International Criminal
Law, vol. 3, ed. M. Cherif Bassiouni (Ardsley: Transnational Publishers, 1987): “The sanc-
tion imposed often appears to be little more than an afterthought” (p. 171).
12. On the other hand, Socrates says that philosophers make ridiculous litigants
(Theaetetus 172c4–6, Apology 17d–18a). Making someone look ridiculous is a way of mak-
ing them less threatening. Making oneself look ridiculous is a way of making oneself
look harmless.
13. Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1983): “While in high literature the seer is always right, in comedy he
is always wrong” (p. 15).
526 Philosophy and Literature

14.  For similarities and differences between comedy and the Socratic dialogue, see
Mitchell Miller, “The Pleasures of the Comic and of Socratic Inquiry: Aporetic Reflections
on Philebus 48a–50b,” Arethusa 41 (2008): 263–89. Contrast Euthyphro with Anytus in the
Meno, who threatens Socrates and whom Socrates regards as a threat and is far from comic.
15. Plato, Laws: “Someone who is giving to gain practical wisdom can’t learn serious
matters without learning ridiculous ones, or anything else, for that matter, without its
opposite. But if we intend to acquire virtue, even on a small scale, we can’t be serious
and comic too, and this is precisely why we must learn to recognize what is ridiculous,
to avoid being trapped by our ignorance of it into doing or saying something ridiculous,
when we don’t have to” (816d5–e5).
16.  Euthyphro’s problem is how to remove pollution without being impious himself
and causing further pollution. Socrates’s problem is how to test others’ opinions and
make them aware of their own ignorance without injuring them by undercutting their
conventional morality but not offering ethical improvement. Just as Euthyphro is
untroubled by being refuted, Socrates is untroubled by his failure to get Euthyphro to
be more reflective.
In addition to the analogies between Socrates and Euthyphro, analogies exist between
Socrates and Euthyphro’s father as objects of prosecution by young, ambitious, ignorant
men. For those analogies, see Eli Diamond, “Parallel Trials: The Dramatic Structure of
Plato’s Euthyphro,” The Classical Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2012): 523–31.
17.  George P. Fletcher and Jens David Ohlin, in Defending Humanity: When Force Is Justified
and Why (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), point out that in biblical Hebrew,
“the biblical terms for crime and punishment are closely related. Thus a debate persists
about what Cain was actually saying when he appealed to God, ‘My avon is more than I
can bear’ (Genesis 4:13). The same word avon can be translated as either ‘iniquity’ or
‘punishment’” (p. 201).
18.  Republic VII: “Wouldn’t this be an all-inclusive precaution, that people not get a
taste of them while they’re young? Because I imagine it hasn’t escaped your notice that
adolescents, when they get their first taste of arguments, exploit them as play, always
using them to contradict; imitating those who engage in cross-examining people, they
themselves cross-examine others, taking delight like puppies in dragging and tearing
apart with the argument the people nearby on each occasion” (539b).
19.  For a more serious assessment of the place of conflict in Greek tragedy, see Michelle
Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict since Aristotle (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988). For conflict and comedy, see Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic
Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
For Euthyphro as tragedy, see R. B. Egan, “Tragic Piety in Plato’s Euthyphro,” Dionysius 7
(1983): 17–32; D. Rohatyn, “The Euthyphro as Tragedy,” Dialogos 9 (1973): 147–51.
20. Another parallel between Euthyphro and Orestes. I remarked earlier that in human
rights prosecutions, as in Euthyphro’s case, the prosecution is always in a sense also on
trial. The Furies who pursue Orestes agree to be judged by Athena.
21. Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, August
12, 1949, accessed through www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/0/e160550475c4b133c12563cd0051a
a66?OpenDocument. For an example of the view I am contesting, consider Arendt’s
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comment: “We refuse, and consider as barbaric, the propositions ‘that a great crime
offends nature, so that the very earth cries out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural
harmony which only retribution can restore; that a wronged collectivity owes a duty to
the moral order to punish the criminal’ (Yosal Rogat). And yet I think it is undeniable
that it was precisely on the ground of these long-forgotten propositions that Eichmann
was brought to justice to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the supreme justification
for the death penalty.” Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press,
1963), p. 277. If piety and pollution are now barbaric and atavistic, I would like to see
an argument to that effect.
22. Kahn, Sacred Violence: “Terror is intended to silence while torture is intended to
force speech. Terror silences a potential opposition while torture eliminates all but a
scripted speech. Yet the one is a pregnant silence and the other is a speech that silences.
They quickly come to the same thing” (p. 17).
23.  There are enough 20th-century examples to make it clear that barbarism is not
necessarily retrograde or primitive. New forms of civilization open up the possibility
of new forms of barbarism. See R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, or Man, Society,
Civilization, and Barbarism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942) and, more recently, Mark
Weiner, The Rule of the Clan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).
24. Socrates argues, and Euthyphro agrees, that the gods can’t need human help. But
see the Apology: “Whenever someone does not seem wise to me, I come to the god’s aid
[tô theôn boêthôn] and show that he is not wise” (23b). 30a also finds Socrates talking about
serving the god (hypêresia, echoing hypêretikè in Euthyphro). See too Phaedo, for further
development and criticism of conceptualizing virtue as exchange.
25. Asad, Formations of the Secular: “It is not always clear whether it is the pain and suf-
fering that the secularist cares about or the pain and suffering that can be attributed to
religious violence because that is pain the modern imaginary conceives as gratuitous”
(p. 11).
26.  Kant’s argument that a desert island society has to execute its murderers before
dissolving is a perfect case in point.
27. All the things discussed here—terror, torture, human rights prosecutions—are the
painful side of the gratuitous, and so connected to the sublime. Piety is an exchange of
gratuitous pleasures between gods and men, divine benefits and sacrifices. The idea of
exchange that Socrates imputes to Euthyphro fails because if something is proportional,
it cannot be gratuitous.