In contemporary philosophy, “The Euthyphro Problem” is a
question about why things are good and about the difficulties in
(a caricature of) divine command theory, but this is a very
different question from the question raised in the Plato’s
dialogue Euthyphro, which treats of various dilemmas that arise
in trying to define what piety is. Euthyphro continually fails
to define piety by continually failing to describe a being that
would be worthy of piety, which is to say that he never comes up
with an adequate notion of the sort of being that deserves to be
worshiped as divine. This is hardly a hidden teaching of the
dialogue, since the first definition of piety that Euthyphro
gives is: Piety is what I am doing, charging my father with
murder…. For do not men regard Zeus as the best and most
righteous of the gods?-and yet they admit that he bound his
father (Cronos) because he wickedly devoured his sons, and that
he too had punished his own father (Uranus) for a similar
reason, in a nameless manner. To which So