208 ARISTOTLE
reasoning is not a universal and does not seem to be an object of scientific knowledge in
the same way that a universal is, [for both these reasons] we seem to be led to the con-
clusion which Socrates sought to establish. Moral weakness does not occur in the pres-
ence of knowledge in the strict sense, and it is sensory knowledge, not science, which is
dragged about by emotion.
This completes our discussion of the question whether a morally weak person
acts with knowledge or without knowledge, and in what sense it is possible for him to
act knowingly.- More Problems Solved: The Sphere in Which Moral Weakness Operates:
(2) The next point we have to discuss is whether it is possible for a man to be morally
weak in the unqualified sense, or whether the moral weakness of all who have it is con-
cerned with particular situations. If the former is the case, we shall have to see with
what kind of situations he is concerned.
Now, it is clearly in their attitude to pleasures and pains that men are morally
strong and tenacious and morally weak and soft. There are two sources of pleasure:
some are necessary, and others are desirable in themselves but admit of excess. The
necessary kind are those concerned with the body: I mean sources of pleasure such
as food and drink and sexual intercourse, in short, the kind of bodily pleasures which
we assigned to the sphere of self-indulgence and self-control.* By sources of plea-
sure which are not necessary but desirable in themselves, I mean, for example, vic-
tory, honor, wealth, and similar good and pleasant things. Now,(a)those who violate
the right reason that they possess by excessive indulgence in the second type of plea-
sures, are not called morally weak in the unqualified sense, but only with a qualifi-
cation: we call them “morally weak in regard to material goods,” or profit, or honor,
or anger, but not “morally weak” pure and simple. They are different from the
morally weak in the unqualified sense and share the same name only by analogy, as
in our example of the man called Man, who won an Olympic victory. In his case
there is not much difference between the general definition of man and the definition
proper to him alone, and yet there was a difference. [That there is similarly a differ-
ence between the two senses of morally weak] is shown by the fact that we blame
moral weakness—regardless of whether it is moral weakness in the unqualified
sense or moral weakness concerning some particular bodily pleasure—not only as
an error, but also as a kind of vice. But we do not blame as vicious those [who are
morally weak in matters of material goods, profit, ambition, anger, and so forth].
(b) We now come to those bodily enjoyments which, we say, are the sphere of the
self-controlled and the self-indulgent. Here a man who pursues the excesses of things
pleasant and avoids excesses of things painful (of hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and of any-
thing we feel by touch or taste), and does so not by choice but against his choice and
thinking, is called “morally weak” without the addition of “in regard to such-and-such,”
e.g., “in regard to feelings of anger,” but simply morally weak without qualification.
The truth of this is proved by the fact that persons who indulge in bodily pleasures are
called “soft,” but not persons who indulge in feelings of anger and so forth. For this rea-
son, we class the morally weak man with the self-indulgent, and the morally strong with
the self-controlled. But we do not include [in the same category] those who indulge in
feelings of anger, because moral weakness and self-indulgence are, in a way, concerned
with the same pleasures and pains. That is, they are concerned with the same pleasures
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5*I.e., the sensual pleasures of taste and touch.1015