What could be wrong with saying that being loved by the gods makes a human act pious? We saw earlier that Socrates was seeking a "form," something that makes the pious acts pious. Could the gods' loving some act make it pious? Socrates thought that this is just a quality that pious acts have, rather than what makes them pious. He seems to have held the view that it is something about the justice of an act that really makes it pious, while the fact that it is loved by the gods is (as Aristotle would put it) a merely accidental quality. An act would remain pious regardless of the gods' attitude toward it. Euthyphro would have to respond by asserting that indeed being loved by the gods is what makes a pious act pious. Piety would be a relative quality, just as being loved is a relative quality. He could say (though as a priest he probably would not say this) that even an unjust act could be pious if the gods loved it. (More likely, he would refuse to distinguish between justice and piety, though.)
