-
Euthyphro Prosecutes a Human Rights Violation
- Philosophy and Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 38, Number 2, October 2014
- pp. 510-527
- 10.1353/phl.2014.0065
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Socrates encounters Euthyphro as both are on their way to court, Socrates as a defendant against charges of blasphemy and Euthyphro as a prosecutor of his father for negligently causing the death of a slaveāa human rights violation. While I argue that piety and pollution supply a productive way of thinking about human rights crime and punishment, Euthyphro is a very troubling model for the human rights prosecutor, since he is an almost paradigmatically unattractive character. Reading the Euthyphro leads to appropriately troubling and ambivalent feelings about contemporary human rights prosecutions.