[28]
9. The motives for failure to prevent injury and1
so for slighting duty are likely to be various: people
either are reluctant to incur enmity or trouble or
expense; or through indifference, indolence, or incompetence, or through some preoccupation or selfinterest they are so absorbed that they suffer those to2
be neglected whom it is their duty to protect. And
so there is reason to fear that what Plato declares
of the philosophers may be inadequate, when he
says that they are just because they are busied with
the pursuit of truth and because they despise and
count as naught that which most men eagerly seek
and for which they are prone to do battle against
each other to the death. For they secure one sort
of justice, to be sure, in that they do no positive
wrong to anyone, but they fall into the opposite
injustice; for hampered by their pursuit of learning
they leave to their fate those whom they ought to
defend. And so, Plato thinks, they will not even
assume their civic duties except under compulsion.
But in fact it were better that they should assume
them of their own accord; for an action intrinsically right is just only on condition that it is
voluntary.
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