The Nicomachean Ethics — trans. F. H. Peters (1881)

Again, what the adversaries of Eudoxus say about his argument from the nature of the opposite of oleasure, does not seem to be sound. They say that, :hough pain be bad, yet it does not foUow that pleasure is good ; for one bad thing may be opposed » another bad thing, and both to a third thing which 8 different from either.* Now, though this is not a osA remark, it does not hold true in the present nstance. For if both were bad, both alike ouirht to » shunned, or if neither were bad, neither should be hunned, or, at least, one no more than the other: mt, as it is, men evidently shun the one as bad and

* The neatral state, neither pleasure nor pain, which they hold obe good.

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choose the other as good; they are, in fact, there fore, opposed to one another in this respect.

ih^tTisnot ^' ^S^i^' e\en though pleasure is not a quality, a quality; j^ (^Qgg j^q^ folIow that it is not a good thine-. The that It IS not o o "

'^tTtisV exercise of virtue, happiness itself, is not a quality.

TomiZlnto I* i^ objected, again, that the good is determinate,

^pu^mres while pleasure is indeterminate, because it admits of kM. '" a more and a less.

Now, if they say this because one may be more or less pleased, then the same thing may be said of justice and the other virtues ; for it is plain that, with regard to them, we speak of people as more or less virtuous : some men are more just and more brave than others, and it is possible to act more or less justly and temperately.

But if they mean that one pleasure may be more or less of a pleasure than another, I suspect that they miss the real reason when they say it is because some are pure and some are mixed. Why should i< not be the same with pleasure as with health, which though something determinate, yet allows of more and less ? For the due proportion of . element [which constitutes health] is not the same for all, noi always the same for the same person, but may varj within certain limits without losing its character being now more and now less truly health. And v may be the same with pleasure.

Again, assuming that the good is complete, whil) motion and coming into being are incomplete, they trj to show that pleasure is a motion and a coming infe being.

But they do not seem to be right even in saying

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tliat it is a motion : for every motion seems necessarily to be quick or slow, either absolutely, as the motion of the universe, or relatively ; but pleasure is neither quick nor slow. It is, indeed, possible to be quickly pleased, as to be quickly angered ; the feeling, however, cannot be quick, even relatively, as can walking and growing, etc. The passage to a state of pleasure, then, may be quick or slow, but the exercise of the power, i.e. the feeling of pleasui-e, cannot be jquick,

Again, how can pleasure be a coming into being ?

It seems that it is not possible for anything to come out of just anything, but what a thing comes lOut of, that it is resolved into. Pain, then, must be ,the dissolution of that whose coming into being is pleasure. Accordingly, they maintain that pain is falling ishort of the normal state, pleasure its replenishment.

But these are bodily processes. K, then, pleasure |be the replenishment of the normal state, that in which the replenishment takes place, i.e. the body, must be that which is pleased. But this does not seem to be the case. Pleasiu-e, therefore, is not a replenishment, but while the process of replenishment is going on we may be pleased, and while the process of exhaustion is going on we may be pained.*