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This post is a *test series element*. Post series can help to split larger
posts into a group of smaller articles. This may helpful, if a large post
should be split into several *main chapters* but grouped together.

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// [[readmore]]
== The Extremes of Good and Evil

.Release Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, edition, 1931
The title *About the Ends of Goods and Evils* requires explanation. It was
Aristotle who put the ethical problem in the form of the question, What is the
T𝜆o or End, the supreme end of man’s endeavour, in the attainment of which his
Good or Well-being lies?

For Aristotle, Telos connoted not only *aim*, but *completion*; and he found
the answer to his question in the complete development and right exercise of
the faculties of man’s nature, and particularly of the distinctively human
faculty of Reason. The life of the Intellect was the Best, the Chief Good; and
lesser Goods were Means to the attainment of this End.

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Thus was introduced the notion of an ascending scale of Goods, and this affected
the interpretation of the term Telos. Telos came to be understood as denoting
not so much the end or aim of endeavour as the end or extreme point of a series,
the topmost good. To this was naturally opposed an extreme of minus value,
the topmost, or rather bottommost, evil.

Hence arose the expressions 𝜏𝜆o 𝛾𝛼𝜃𝜈, 𝜏𝜆o 𝜅𝛼𝜅𝜈, *End of Goods, of Evils*, which
occur in Philodemus, Rhetoric I, 218.8 ff. (Südhans), and are translated by
Cicero finis bonorum et malorum.

As a title for his book he throws this phrase into the plural, meaning
*different views as to the Chief Good and Evil*. Hence in title and to some
extent in method, the de Finibus may be compared with such modern works a
Martineau’s Types of Ethical Theory and Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics.

[quote, Cicero · Paragraph 1.10.32, Translation by H. Rackham · Issue 1914 - De Finibus]
____
But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing
pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete
account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great
explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness.

No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is
pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure
rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor
again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain
of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances
occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.

To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious
physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who
has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure
that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that
produces no resultant pleasure?
____

This he sets out to prove as follows: every animal, as soon as it is born,
seeks for pleasure, and delights in it as the Chief Good, while it recoils
from pain as the Chief Evil, and so far as possible avoids it. This it does
as long as it remains unperverted, at the prompting of Nature’s own unbiased
and honest verdict.

Hence Epicurus refuses to admit any necessity for argument or discussion to
prove that pleasure is desirable and pain to be avoided. These facts, he
thinks, are perceived by the senses, as that fire is hot, snow white, honey
sweet, none of which things need be proved by elaborate argument: it is enough
merely to draw attention to them.

For there is a difference, he holds, between formal syllogistic proof of a
thing and a mere notice or reminder: the former is the method for discovering
abstruse and recondite truths, the latter for indicating facts that are obvious
and evident.

Strip mankind of sensation, and nothing remains; it follows that Nature herself
is the judge of that which is in accordance with or contrary to nature. What
does Nature perceive or what does she judge of, beside pleasure and pain, to
guide her actions of desire and of avoidance?
//////////