in the first quotation I took from the Euthyphro Socrates talks about piety as adherence to “divine law”, and in the second he suggests that “everything pious must be morally right”.
The first part is just the definition of “piety”, at least in modern English. The second part may contradict the quotes from Chappelle and Anscome; what word does Plato use for “morally right” and what does he mean by it? Can you shed more light on this?
(I should have asked this question to begin with. I find I didn’t read your comment carefully enough at first.)
See here for an answer to the related question “what did some experts circa 1940 think classical Greek writers generally meant by it?”.
Can you shed more light on this?
Not in the sense of having great expertise of my own, as I acknowledged from the outset. It looks fairly clear to me that “dikaios”, as Plato’s Socrates and Euthyphro use it in this dialogue, has at least a large overlap with terms like “morally right” in contemporary English. Anscombe may be right to say that the ancient Greeks had no word meaning “wrong” or “illicit”, but it is difficult for me to look at the LSJ lexicon entry for “dikaios” and deny that they had one for more or less the exact opposite. But it’s also hard to believe that Anscombe wrote what she did in simple ignorance of this; perhaps I am missing something important.
C. I don’t really understand the glosses here; they seem to refer to justification or lawfulness: bound to; have a right to.
This is woefully insufficient for me to understand the matter on my own. Just from this, it’s not clear to me that the word means moral and not simply right or just, or perhaps what we might call “proper behavior”. These things are certainly related to morality, but they also seem consistent with descriptions like “excellence of character,” not “moral virtue”.
The first part is just the definition of “piety”, at least in modern English. The second part may contradict the quotes from Chappelle and Anscome; what word does Plato use for “morally right” and what does he mean by it? Can you shed more light on this?
(I should have asked this question to begin with. I find I didn’t read your comment carefully enough at first.)
“dikaios” (δίκαιος).
See here for an answer to the related question “what did some experts circa 1940 think classical Greek writers generally meant by it?”.
Not in the sense of having great expertise of my own, as I acknowledged from the outset. It looks fairly clear to me that “dikaios”, as Plato’s Socrates and Euthyphro use it in this dialogue, has at least a large overlap with terms like “morally right” in contemporary English. Anscombe may be right to say that the ancient Greeks had no word meaning “wrong” or “illicit”, but it is difficult for me to look at the LSJ lexicon entry for “dikaios” and deny that they had one for more or less the exact opposite. But it’s also hard to believe that Anscombe wrote what she did in simple ignorance of this; perhaps I am missing something important.
I don’t know any Greek, either modern or ancient, so I can’t judge the LSJ entry for myself. Here’s a summary of the English glosses:
A. Observant of customs or rules, especially social rules; civilized.
A-2. Observant of duty to gods and men; righteous.
B. Equal, even, well-balanced, fair, impartial; legally exact, precise; lawful, just, right; fitting.
C. I don’t really understand the glosses here; they seem to refer to justification or lawfulness: bound to; have a right to.
This is woefully insufficient for me to understand the matter on my own. Just from this, it’s not clear to me that the word means moral and not simply right or just, or perhaps what we might call “proper behavior”. These things are certainly related to morality, but they also seem consistent with descriptions like “excellence of character,” not “moral virtue”.