Do Not Be a Jerk for Justice (Euthyphro)

Last updated on: June 30, 2016 at 7:58 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Do Not Be a Jerk for Justice (Euthyphro) 2016-06-30T19:58:16-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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-Blasts-from_The_Ram's_Horn(1902)_(14781372921)_opt There is a West Virginia expression: “He is so straight, he leans a little.”

God help us never to be such jerks for justice . . .

The jerk for justice takes a good cause, a noble idea, and bends his whole life around that idea until he makes the truth, the cause, or the idea loathsome to everyone. He isn’t wrong about his guiding truth, just wrong in how he allows it to swallow up every other truth. This is the pro-life worker who begins hateful to everyone not an unborn child, because of his love for unborn children. This is the leftist who loves humankind in general, but loathes all the poor he knows for lacking sufficient social conscience. The man dedicated to charity who gains the money he gives by underpaying his workers is a common type of the jerk for justice as is the person who attacks such a man from the comforts of a well paid media gig . . . giving nothing to anyone.

There is no truth so true that we cannot turn it into an idol for destruction.

The best example of this is found in Euthyphro where a jerk for justice decides his father must die for a crime he has committed. He is right that justice must be done and that even a father must be prosecuted, but Euthyphro has no sorrow. He is eager to seek justice on his father and has no sense of mercy or understanding.

He is right that his duty to seek justice outweighs (if just barely), the duty he owes to his parents, but he doesn’t see the difficulty of the decision. We are tipped off to his problem for the first sentence, when Euthyphro says:

What’s new, Socrates, to make you leave your usual haunts in the Lyceum and spend your time here by the king-archon’s court?

Socrates is not the sort of person you expect to see in court, because no normal person who is not becoming a jerk for justice wants to be in court. A man might have to work in the courts as a career, but for the rest of us, court is a place we should not wish to go. Euthyphro is like the man who is constantly threatening to sue. . . or is about to sue . . . or delights in telling you stories about people he sued. Conan Doyle has such a character in his Hound of the Baskervilles and it shocks no reader to discover later that he is a horrible father and a cruel man.

He is a jerk for justice.

Instead of the court, Socrates spends his time in the Lyceum … the place where young men could be found and educated. The jerk wants to punish someone, the just man to educate someone.

Of course, sometimes good people must go to court. Crimes must be prosecuted, especially against the powerless, but nobody needs to be happy about it. We pray for mercy even as we take a person to court. As Saint Paul showed, there is nothing wrong with using our rights as citizens, but the Christian stays out of the courts when he can.

We must fight for justice, chiefly by positive means, and becoming so fixated on one aspect of virtue that we avoid becoming jerks for justice.

—————————————–

Plato is the greatest philosopher outside of Christendom. Reject him or accept him, nobody ignores him. This summer I will be looking at the first lines of all of his dialogues. Because he carefully crafted his dialogues, the first line often contain clues to the meaning of what will come next. I have written about how to read Plato in When Athens Met Jerusalem and The Great Books Reader. I tried my hand at Platonic myth making in Chasing Shadows.

Apology begins with the persuasiveness of crowds and the need for the elite to listen. Euthyphro tells us to avoid being a jerk for justice.

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