NICOMACHEANETHICS(BOOKVII) 211
active in sexual intercourse. Nor would we apply the term to persons in a morbid con-
dition as a result of habit. To have one of these characteristics means to be outside the
limits of vice, just as brutishness, too, lies outside the limits of vice. To have such char-
acteristics and to master them or be mastered by them does not constitute moral
[strength or] weakness in an unqualified sense but only by analogy, just as a person is
not to be called morally weak without qualification when he cannot master his anger,
but only morally weak in regard to the emotion involved.
For all excessive folly, cowardice, self-indulgence, and ill-temper is either brutish
or morbid. When someone is by nature the kind of person who fears everything, even
the rustling of a mouse, his cowardice is brutish, while the man’s fear of the weasel was
due to disease. In the case of folly, those who are irrational by nature and live only by
their senses, as do some distant barbarian tribes, are brutish, whereas those whose irra-
tionality is due to a disease, such as epilepsy, or to insanity, are morbid.
Sometimes it happens that a person merely possesses one of these characteristics
without being mastered by it—I mean, for example, if a Phalaris had restrained his
appetite so as not to eat the flesh of a child or so as not to indulge in some perverse form
of sexual pleasure. But it also happens that a man not only has the characteristic but is
mastered by it. Thus, just as the term “wickedness” refers in its unqualified sense to man
alone, while in another sense it is qualified by the addition of “brutish” or “morbid,” in
precisely the same way it is plain that there is a brutish and a morbid kind of moral weak-
ness [i.e., being mastered by brutishness or disease], but in its unqualified sense the term
“moral weakness” refers only to human self-indulgence.
It is, accordingly, clear that moral weakness and moral strength operate only in
the same sphere as do self-indulgence and self-control, and that the moral weakness
which operates in any other sphere is different in kind, and is called “moral weakness”
only by extension, not in an unqualified sense.
- Moral Weakness in Anger:At this point we may observe that moral weakness
in anger is less base than moral weakness in regard to the appetites. For (1) in a way,
anger seems to listen to reason, but to hear wrong, like hasty servants, who run off
before they have heard everything their master tells them, and fail to do what they were
ordered, or like dogs, which bark as soon as there is a knock without waiting to see if
the visitor is a friend. In the same way, the heat and swiftness of its nature make anger
hear but not listen to an order, before rushing off to take revenge. For reason and imag-
ination indicate that an insult or a slight has been received, and anger, drawing the con-
clusion, as it were, that it must fight against this sort of thing, simply flares up at once.
Appetite, on the other hand, is no sooner told by reason and perception that something
is pleasant than it rushes off to enjoy it. Consequently, while anger somehow follows
reason, appetite does not. Hence appetite is baser [than anger]. For when a person is
morally weak in anger, he is in a sense overcome by reason, but the other is not over-
come by reason but by appetite.
Further, (2) it is more excusable to follow one’s natural desires, inasmuch as we
are also more inclined to pardon such appetites as are common to all men and to the
extent that they are common to all. Now anger and ill temper are more natural than
are the appetites which make us strive for excess and for what is not necessary. Take the
example of the man who was defending himself against the charge of beating his father
with the words: “Yes, I did it: my father, too, used to beat his father, and he beat his,
and”—pointing to his little boy—“he will beat me when he grows up to be a man. It
runs in the family.” And the story goes that the man who was being dragged out of the
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