According To Socrates What Is The Pious

Socrates is a man who relies on his manipulative tricks of rhetoric and cunning wisdom to dismantle and disprove his opponents of conversation. “What is the pious, and what the impious, do you say?” (6) Socrates asks one of these opponents, a man named Euthyphro, who is at court to prosecute his own father - an action which Euthyphro thinks to be pious. Socrates asks Euthyphro to define piety, and as he does so, Socrates uses their conversation to mock and twist Euthyphro’s words so they contradict themselves. Socrates wishes for Euthyphro to give him a general answer to the question of all things pious and impious. Over and over, Socrates traps his opponent to prove Euthyphro’s ignorance, and over and over, the man falls to humiliation.
The man believes himself to be pious by prosecuting the wrongdoer, in this case, his father. This is because murder, even if unintentional, is wrong and therefore should not go unpunished. Socrates rebuts this claim with the knowledge that there is more to being pious than only prosecuting wrongdoers, so this one action cannot define all things pious and impious. Euthyphro agrees to better answer the question, and in doing so, he changes his answer. “What is dear to the gods is pious, and what is not is impious,” (8) the man states. Again, Socrates finds a suitable argument for this answer. He says that if what Euthyphro stated were true, and if all of the gods were different, then piety toward one god would not be piety toward another. They agree that piety is that which all of the gods love, and impiety is that which all of the gods do not