Is Good Just What the Gods Want? — Socrates to Sartre (Lecture 2)

Lecture 2 of "From Socrates to Sartre: How Should We Live?." Watch the full lecture series: From Socrates to Sartre: How Should We Live? Presented by Ergo, a nonprofit that publishes structured philosophical lectures online, free to anyone. https://ergo.org About this lecture In this lecture, Lee Braver walks through Plato's Euthyphro dialogue, following Socrates as he dismantles successive attempts to define piety. When Euthyphro claims piety is what the gods love, Socrates raises a devastating question: do the gods love something because it is good, or is it good because the gods love it? Braver illustrates this dilemma with striking analogies. Confederate money shows how value can be purely a matter of collective belief, while an apple's nourishment exists regardless of what anyone thinks. The stakes are enormous: if God creates ethics, then morality becomes arbitrary, changeable on a whim. But if goodness exists objectively, independent of divine will, then philosophy has real work to do. Each definition Euthyphro offers fails in a different way, and yet the dialogue's apparent failure is its deepest lesson. Socrates shows that the examined life, the relentless search for truth, is itself the point. This quest, Braver argues, is the inheritance Socrates leaves us across two thousand years. About this course Lee Braver walks through the great ethical theories of Western philosophy, beginning with a question we can't escape: what does it mean to be good? Starting with Socrates, who taught us what an ethical system must look like, the course moves through three traditions in reverse chronological order. Mill's utilitarianism measures actions by happiness and suffering, Kant insists that only motivation matters, and Aristotle shifts the focus to character. The course concludes with Sartre, who argues that we are radically free, with no rules waiting to be discovered. About Lee Braver Lee Braver is a Courtesy Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, where he was a Professor of Philosophy from 2012 to 2025. His interests include continental philosophy, especially Heidegger and Foucault, Wittgenstein, realism, and dialogue between continental and analytic philosophy. He is the author of A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and Heidegger: Thinking of Being, and editor of Division III of Being and Time: Heidegger's Unanswered Question of Being. Chapters 00:00 Piety as What the Gods Love 02:02 Learning Without Finding the Answer 03:42 When Gods Disagree: The Contradiction Problem 09:30 Fixing the Definition: What All Gods Love 12:16 The Birth of Critical Thinking 15:06 The Famous Dilemma: Two Kinds of Value 16:53 The Dollar Bill vs. The Apple 21:12 Is Goodness Created or Discovered? 22:27 The Island With Two Cars 26:35 If God Creates Ethics, Ethics Is Arbitrary 30:58 Why Socrates Needs Ethics to Be Objective 35:10 Helpless Without Objective Morality 39:51 Philosophy Requires Objective Truth 42:34 How Each Definition Fails Differently 45:19 The Fourth Definition and Its Collapse 47:47 The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living 49:56 The Supreme Irony: Searching IS the Answer