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and might have known without difficulty;
[9]
and so in other cases where ignorance is held to be due to negligence,
on the ground that the offender need not have been ignorant, as he could have taken the
trouble to ascertain the facts.
[10]
It may be objected that perhaps he is not the sort of man to take the trouble. Well, but
men are themselves responsible for having become careless through living carelessly, as
they are for being unjust or profligate if they do wrong or pass their time in drinking
and dissipation. They acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular
way.
[11]
This is shown by the way in which men train
themselves for some contest or pursuit: they practice continually.
[12]
Therefore only an utterly senseless person can fail to know that our
characters are the result of our conduct;1 but if a man knowingly acts in a way
that will result in his becoming unjust, he must be said to be voluntarily
unjust.
[13]
Again, though it is unreasonable to say that a man who acts unjustly or dissolutely does
not wish to be unjust or dissolute,
[14]
nevertheless this by
no means implies that he can stop being unjust and become just merely by wishing to do so;
any more than a sick man can get well by wishing, although it may be the case that his
illness is voluntary, in the sense of being due to intemperate living and neglect of the
doctors' advice. At the outset then, it is true, he might have avoided the illness, but
once he has let himself go he can do so no longer. When you have thrown a stone, you
cannot afterwards bring it back again, but nevertheless you are responsible for having
taken up the stone and flung it, for the origin of the act was within you. Similarly the
unjust and profligate might at the outset have
avoided becoming so, and therefore they are so voluntarily, although having become unjust
and profligate it is no longer open to them not to be so.
[15]
And not only are vices of the soul voluntary, but in some cases bodily defects are so as
well, and we blame them accordingly. Though no one blames a man for being born ugly, we
censure uncomeliness that is due to neglecting exercise and the care of the person. And so
with infirmities and mutilations: though nobody would reproach, but rather pity, a person
blind from birth, or owing to disease or accident, yet all would blame one who had lost
his sight from tippling or debauchery.
[16]
We see then that
bodily defects for which we are ourselves responsible are blamed, while those for which we
are not responsible are not. This being so, it follows that we are responsible for
blameworthy moral defects also.
[17]
But suppose somebody says: “All men seek what seems to them good, but they are
not responsible for its seeming good:
1 The words, ‘but if a man . . . unjust’ in the mss. come after 5.13, ‘unjust or dissolute.’