Cicero (on the Stoics) · 106–43 BCE
On Duties 3.12 — Cicero (on the Stoics)
Translation by Walter Miller (1913)
Cicero (on the Stoics), On Duties 3.12
But if Panaetius were the sort of man to say that virtue is worth cultivating only because it is productive of advantage, as do certain philosophers who measure the desirableness of things by the standard of pleasure or of absence of pain, he might argue that expediency sometimes clashes with moral rectitude. But since he is a man who judges that the morally right is the only good, and that those things which come in conflict with it have only the appearance of expediency and cannot make life any better by their presence nor any worse by their absence, it follows that he ought not to have raised a question involving the weighing of what seems expedient against what is morally right.
Cite this passage
Cicero (on the Stoics), On Duties 3.12, tr. Walter Miller (1913)
https://whatwouldstoicsdo.com/passage/on-duties/3.12
Cicero, On Duties (De Officiis), tr. Walter Miller (Loeb, 1913). Text: Perseus Digital Library (CC BY-SA 4.0). Sources and licences
In plain English
AI-written notesOnly someone who prizes virtue for the payoff it brings, or who judges things by pleasure, could think that right and advantage might conflict. If moral goodness is the only real good, anything that looks profitable but is wrong cannot make life better, and doing right cannot make it worse.
Older wording
- “expediency”
- — usefulness or advantage
- “moral rectitude”
- — morally correct conduct
Themes and situations
- Virtue and character
- Pleasure and pain
- An ethical dilemma
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