Book 2
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(5) There are three things that are the motives of choice and three that are the motives of avoidance; namely, the noble, the expedient, and the pleasant, and their opposites, the base, the harmful, and the painful. Now in respect of all these the good man is likely to go right and the bad to go wrong, but especially in respect of pleasure; for pleasure is common to man with the lower animals, and also it is a concomitant of all the objects of choice, since both the noble and the expedient appear to us pleasant.
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(6) Again, the susceptibility to pleasure has grown up with all of us from the cradle. Hence this feeling is hard to eradicate, being engrained in the fabric of our lives.
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(7) Again, pleasure and pain are alsoSc., as well as being the sources of our feelings. the standards by which we all, in a greater or less degree, regulate our actions.
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On this account therefore pleasure and pain are necessarily our main concern, since to feel pleasure and pain rightly or wrongly has a great effect on conduct.
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(8) And again, it is harder to fight against pleasure than against anger (hard as that is, as HeracleitusHeraclitus, Fr. 105 (Bywater) θυμῷ μάχεσθαι χαλεπόν· ὅ τι γὰρ ἂν χρηίζῃ γίνεσθαι, ψυχῆς ὠνέεται, it is hard to fight with anger [or desire, θυμῷ in the Homeric sense, Burnet]. Whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of life. says); but virtue, like art, is constantly dealing with what is harder, since the harder the task the better is success. For this reason also therefore pleasure and pain are necessarily the main concern both of virtue and of political science, since he who comports himself towards them rightly will be good, and he who does so wrongly, bad.
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We may then take it as established that virtue has to do with pleasures and pains, that the actions which produce it are those which increase it, and also, if differently performed, destroy it, and that the actions from which it was produced are also those in which it is exercised.
