Euthyphro and Socrates meet by the Archon Basileios' stoa. The Stoa Basileios, or Basileus. In english, the king ruler's porch, or his court. Our translation picks court. But you may as well know stoa is a word for a kind of architecture. Courthouse might be closer but that's misleading too. A stoa doesn't have to be for law cases. It's functional for any kind of semi-public use. Meeting, buying, selling, worshiping. You can visit, but you wouldn't want to live in one. A stoa is an open-sided colonnaded building. It's kind of like a stand-alone porch. Hence that's a possible translation, porch. Google is your friend as always if you want to see pictures. I mentioned last lesson that the archon basileus is not a king, even though that's sort of what the title should mean in Greek. He's an elected city official in Athens. One of his major duties is holding preliminary hearings in cases of any allegation of religious crime. Euthyphro is alleging one, his dad is a murderer. And murder is religious crime, we'll talk about that. Socrates is alleged to have committed one, corrupting the youth and fabricating God, or something of the sort. It's sort of unclear whether that really is a proper crime, religious or otherwise, under Athenian law, but that didn't stop the Athenians, he was convicted and executed. I talked about it quite a bit last lesson. Let's get down to the details of Euthyphro's case. It's on page 150 of our book. It starts at 4c if you're using some other edition of Plato. Euthyphro says that he and dad were farming on Naxos. Naxos is an island and not all that close to Athens. I asked Google how far, and the answer came back. 243 kilometers. That's ten hours and 43 minutes, mostly by ferry, if you choose to travel that way. This will be important. A family servant, a paid laborer, got drunk and killed a family slave. Euthyphro's father tied up the murderer and threw him in a ditch. Since we also hear that dad is rather old, presumably he instructed someone else to do this part, sounds kind of hard. Then dad asked a man to ask an exegete, that is a kind of religious advisor, what to do. Here's where the ferry ride comes in. The adviser would have been in Athens, not in Naxos. While waiting to hear back, the man in the ditch died of some likely combination of his injuries, being tied up and being in a ditch. Every lesson, I try to teach you something definitely true. Last week, you probably learned that Hemlock is poisonous. If you didn't know it already. Socrates was forced to drink it and he died. Kids, just say no to Hemlock. A cold ditch is not as immediately deadly as a cup of hemlock. But the dose makes the poison. Let's consider. Today, it takes more than ten hours to get from Naxos to Athens by boat. That means there and back is almost a full day. And Google, in addition to giving me complicated directions for travel, tells me. I quote, these directions are for planning purposes only. You may find that construction projects, traffic, weather or other events may cause conditions to differ from the map results, and you should plan your route accordingly. Unquote. Google should have mentioned that what century you are living in, can also make a big difference for travel time. Waiting for days for a boat, depending on the season, you might not be able to sail at all. Storms, maybe pirates. Although the Athenian navy does keep a pretty solid lid on that. Bad roads, no roads. I don't know. Did the Exegetes have daily office hours, and did they accept walk-ins? Or did you have to make an appointment? You get the point. We're talking weeks here easily, maybe months before Euthyphro, Euthyphro's dad gets any word back about what he should do with that guy in his ditch. So, as who done its go, this one isn't a big mystery. But I'll make sure you're awake out there. Here's a quiz. Who killed the servant? A, Miss Scarlet did it in the library with the knife. B, Mr. Green did it in the drawing room with the lead pipe. C, Euthyphro's dad did it in the ditch with the ditch. The answer is C, very obviously. I hope you got that right. We have a pretty clear case of murder by ditch. You cannot, cannot leave a person tied up for weeks in a ditch. They will overdose on ditch and die. Everyone knows this about ditches. QED, Euthyphro's dad killed that guy. Now the question is, how do we feel about this killing? Murder by ditch is funny but maybe not accurate. Killing by ditch mm, yeah. Murder is always wrong. Murder just means something like wrongful killing with intent or at least wrongful killing. Just plain killing is not always wrong, or at least not self evidently wrong. It isn't part of the concept to kill that it's always wrong to do it. Most people will say that sometimes killing is justified at, at the very least, it's sometimes excusable. It seems safe to say that killing is more likely to be excusable when the victim was a bad actor, a murderer himself as in this case. And even more excusable, when the death comes from something you omit to do, like remove someone from a ditch, rather than something you positively do, like stick a knife in them. If I fail to pull someone from a burning building and they die, I'm not a murderer. It's not clear I'm even a killer. On the other hand, if I set the fire myself. [LAUGH], okay. No one would deny that Euthyphro's dad was justified in restraining a murderer, possibly in quite an uncomfortable fashion. The question is whether he had a positive duty to pull the guy out of the ditch at some later point, after they had made some further sensible arrangements, before he actually died of exposure. You see the first Nolan Batman film, Batman Begins. If not, then warning, plot spoilers. In the end, Batman defeats the main villain. If you did see it, your remember when Batman tells the villain in question, I won't kill, okay. Excuse me. I gotta do the right voice. I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you. And then he doesn't. This annoyed some viewers. Batman doesn't kill. Letting someone die when you could save them is just plain killing them. Batman doesn't kill and he isn't some picky rules lawyer who weasels around the no kill rule. He's the Batman not Weasel Man whose super power is always happening to be in a position to save some criminal from dying, but then refraining from doing so in some neat way. On the other hand, some viewers said, yay perfect solution. Villain dead and our hero keeps his hero hands clean. All's well that ends well. After all, this is Ray Shagool or however the guy's name is pronounced. He's a murderer. He deserves to die for what he done. That's an argument for killing him, not an argument that leaving him to die isn't a form of killing him. I know, I know, he's probably not really dead. He'll come back in a couple of sequels. He's a major villain. But you see the point I'm making. Anyway, the ancient Greeks would have seen it. Is batman a good comparison for Euthyphro's dad? Well, there weren't any police around on Naxos to hand the criminal over to. What was Euthyphro's dad supposed to do if not let this man, who deserved to die, die. So that's one major issue, killing and letting die. And a lack of local law enforcement. What should Euthyphro's dad have done? But, really, the main ethical issue, at least the one the dialog encourages us to focus on, turns out to be a different one. What should Euthyphro do about what dad did? Obviously, this question depends on our answer of the first one. But even if you think you know what Euthyphro's dad should have done, that doesn't necessarily tell you what Euthyphro should do now. The Athenians have a highly sophisticated court system and set of laws. They don't have a police force to speak of. Well, technically they had a really, really tiny one but it didn't do anything outside the actual city of Athens, not much even within it. They don't even have a public prosecutor's office. Normally, the victim's family is expected to bring prosecution. They really have a positive legal duty to do so. That's how it's supposed to work. But the victim in this case has no family or maybe they don't want to defend their murderous son, or more likely, guy wasn't even an Athenian. For whatever reason, no one else is stepping up to press charges evidently. It's Euthyphro himself or nobody. So which should it be? Euthyphro says he's doing the right thing but everyone else, especially his family, thinks he's nuts and or they're mad at him. To put it another way, Euthyphro is standing up for a procedural principle, namely, if there's probable cause to think someone caused a wrongful death a trial ought to be held. If the person is guilty they should be punished, if not, their good name should be cleared. The demand that the justice system do its job is separate from any specific judgement about guilt or innocence. That seems to make sense. On the other side, the family presumably maintains that dad is innocent, innocent, innocent. But mostly they are standing up for a different, also procedural principle. Even if the father were manifestly guilty, it would not be Euthyphro's place to prosecute him. He's his son. So dad's guilt or innocence, confusing as that issue is, is not the crux of the dispute between Euthyphro and his family. It's that crux that Socrates is trying to get at. So obviously, what we need to do is fight about the meaning of the word holiness. No, wait. What? Why? Let's talk about it in the next video. But let's end this one with another quiz. What do you think of Euthyphro, the guy? A, What a jerk, prosecuting dear old Dad. The kids coming up these days. I swear. B, I don't know. It seems morally brave to go against your family and community for the sake of what you truly believe in. C, Mm, I could go either way. As usual, I will accept any answer. One thing that is interesting to think about, with regard to this dialogue, is that readers really do react quite differently to the title character. You might want to think about that.
