[4]
The motives which lead men to do injury and
commit wrong actions are depravity and incontinence. For if men have one or more
vices, it is in that which makes him vicious that he shows himself unjust; for
example, the illiberal in regard to money, the licentious in regard to bodily
pleasures, the effeminate in regard to what makes for ease,1 the coward in regard to dangers, for fright
makes him desert his comrades in peril;
the ambitious in
his desire for honor, the irascible owing to anger, one who is eager to conquer
in his desire for victory, the rancorous in his desire for vengeance; the
foolish man from having mistaken ideas of right and wrong, the shameless from
his contempt for the opinion of others. Similarly, each of the rest of mankind
is unjust in regard to his special weakness.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 22, translated by J. H. Freese. Aristotle. Cambridge and London. Harvard University Press; William Heinemann Ltd. 1926.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.