Socrates: Remember that I did not ask you to give me two or three examples of piety, but to explain the general idea which makes all pious things to be pious. Do you not recollect that there was one idea which made the impious impious, and the pious pious?
Euthyphro: I remember.
Socrates: Tell me what this is, and then I shall have a standard to which I may look, and by which I may measure the nature of actions, whether yours or any one’s else, and say that this action is pious, and that impious?
– Plato (423 – 347 BC)
Socrates, in the dialogue Euthyphro, shows us the foolishness of thinking that we can discover a standard for piety. He doesn’t dissuade us from attempting to order our lives around it, only from claiming that anyone can know the “truth” about what it really is.
Like so much qualia, we cannot see piety in its ideal form; we only see something that verges upon it when people around us cling to their own, individual sense of it. It is a collective, imperfect illusion.
Greenness, it has been noted, does not make the grass real — but grass does makes green real. Nor do ideals, like piety, make people real; but people make ideals real. This perspective makes a very different landscape. Piety, justice, democracy, tolerance, beauty – these are the landmarks and pathways that guide us. Evolution, until now, has been the story of matter clothing itself with qualia. But the story has changed.