[5]
Moreover, the subject of this inquiry is the common 1 property of all philosophers; for who would
presume to call himself a philosopher, if he did not
inculcate any lessons of duty? But there are some
schools that distort all notions of duty by the theories
they propose touching the supreme good and the
supreme evil. For he who posits the supreme good
as having no connection with virtue and measures it
not by a moral standard but by his own interests—
if he should be consistent and not rather at times
over-ruled by his better nature, he could value
neither friendship nor justice nor generosity; and
brave he surely cannot possibly be that counts pain
the supreme evil, nor temperate he that holds
pleasure to be the supreme good.
1 The philosophic schools and ethical teaching.
M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. With An English Translation. Walter Miller. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1913.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
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.