Euthyphro: Thinking Straight, Thinking in Circles
103
You no doubt know that many men with unclean hands, or suffering from other pollution, have, by taking ship with others destroyed not only their own lives but along with themselves men who were pure; and also that others, although escaping death, have had inflicted upon them the greatest dangers because of such men; and also that many attending at the sacrifices have been shown to be impure and to be standing in the way of the performance of the rites. (A.5.82) The ship case is nice because it solves for the variable of intention, also for any ‘collective guilt’. I can feel ashamed of something my country has done, my family, my in-group. But if the stranger you happen to sit next to on the boat turns out to be a fugitive murderer, it can hardly be your fault. Still, you can catch your death from miasma. The moral of this story is that pollution, in this ancient Greek sense, is not strictly a moral story. There are guilty people who are not polluted. Note how when Euthyphro lists things that count as ‘wrong-doing’ he lists, “murder or temple robbery or anything else” (5d). ‘Anything else’ would seem to cover: robbing a merchant, breaking a contract. Doing all that is wrong, right? Yes, but what Euthyphro is trying to get at is the sort of wrongdoing whose prosecution counts as holy (because it cleans miasma.) So even at this early stage, where he is just listing a few obvious examples, not yet offering bad definitions, he is already misspeaking. He is conflating justice with holiness, via ‘wrong-doing’. Conversely, there are polluted people who are not guilty. New mothers are polluted; soldiers who kill in battle. There is no moral guilt associated with giving birth or defending your city. A highly but not strictly common denominator in these cases is blood. There are rituals for handling blood; places you don’t go until cleansed. Call it superstition, contagious magic, hemophobia, innate disgust response, metaphor, religion, moral confusion. Whatever it is, it is the basileus’ business. He’s the divine sanitation engineer for the city. He cleans up spilled blood.
© John Holbo/Belle Waring 2015. Please do not distribute without permission.