Hence we ought to have been
brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says,
so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought;
for this is the right education.
Again, if the virtues are concerned with actions and passions, and
every passion and every action is accompanied by pleasure and pain,
for this reason also virtue will be concerned with pleasures and
pains. This is indicated also by the fact that punishment is inflicted
by these means; for it is a kind of cure, and it is the nature of
cures to be effected by contraries.
Again, as we said but lately, every state of soul has a nature
relative to and concerned with the kind of things by which it tends to
be made worse or better; but it is by reason of pleasures and pains
that men become bad, by pursuing and avoiding these- either the
pleasures and pains they ought not or when they ought not or as they
ought not, or by going wrong in one of the other similar ways that may
be distinguished. Hence men even define the virtues as certain
states of impassivity and rest; not well, however, because they
speak absolutely, and do not say 'as one ought' and 'as one ought not'
and 'when one ought or ought not', and the other things that may be
added. We assume, then, that this kind of excellence tends to do
what is best with regard to pleasures and pains, and vice does the
contrary.
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