Piety and Justice

Late in the dialogue, Euthyphro proposes that piety is the part of justice that concerns the gods, while the rest of justice concerns human relationships. Socrates finds this promising but presses for more: what specifically is it that piety does for the gods? What service does piety render? Euthyphro says that it is a kind of service that gives the gods pleasure and gratification — but this collapses back into the definition that piety is what the gods love, which has already been rejected.

The question of piety's relationship to justice is not merely dialectical manoeuvring. It points toward a genuine philosophical issue: whether religious obligation and moral obligation are ultimately the same thing or fundamentally different. If piety is a part of justice, then the requirements of religion and the requirements of morality are ultimately continuous; if they are separate, conflicts between divine commands and moral demands become possible in principle. The Euthyphro dilemma itself turns on this: if divine commands are morally arbitrary, piety and justice could diverge radically.

The Euthyphro is often described as ending in failure — no definition is reached, and Euthyphro rushes off to his prosecution. But this failure is philosophically productive. It has established what an adequate definition must not be (an example, a list of instances, a reference to divine approval without independent justification) and has mapped the logical space that any successful account of piety must navigate. This is characteristic of the early Socratic dialogues: their aporetic endings are not signs of futility but invitations to think harder.

The question of whether Socrates himself had a positive view of piety — or whether the aporetic ending represents genuine ignorance — has been debated since antiquity. The Apology suggests that Socrates understood his philosophising as a form of religious service: the examined life is itself a kind of piety, a devotion to whatever the god truly requires.