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[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.
M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. With An English Translation. Walter Miller. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1913.
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