Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Furthermore, of the goods pertaining to the soul, some are states, some are dispositions, and some are neither states nor dispositions. The virtues are dispositions, occupations are states, and activities are neither states nor dispositions. And generally among goods, having good children and a good old age are mixed goods, while knowledge is a simple good. And while the virtues are always present, others are not always present, such as joy and walking. Every good is advantageous, obligatory, profitable, useful, serviceable, noble, beneficial, choice-worthy, and just:

​advantageous, because it brings about such things as through whose occurrence we are benefited; obligatory, because it holds fast in those things where one ought; profitable, because it pays off the expenses laid out upon it, so that the return from the business exceeds in benefit; useful, because it furnishes the use of benefit; serviceable, because it renders its use praiseworthy; noble, because it is well-proportioned to its own use; beneficial, because it is of such a nature as to benefit; choice-worthy, because it is of such a nature that it is reasonably chosen; and just, because it is in harmony with law and productive of community.

​And they call the perfect good “noble” because it possesses in full all the numbers demanded by nature, or because it is completely well-proportioned. And there are four species of the noble: the just, the courageous, the orderly, and the knowledgeable; for in these the noble actions are brought to completion. And proportionally, of the base there are also four species: the unjust, the cowardly, the disorderly, and the foolish. And “noble” is spoken of in one sense as that which renders its possessors praiseworthy, or as a good worthy of praise; in another sense as being well suited by nature for its own proper work; and in yet another sense as that which adorns, as when we say that only the wise man is good and noble.

​And they say that the noble alone is good, as Hecato says in the third book of On Goods and Chrysippus in his work On the Noble; and that this is virtue and that which partakes of virtue, with which it is equivalent that every good is noble, and that the good is of equal value to the noble, which is equal to this. For since it is good, it is noble; and it is noble; therefore it is good. And it is held that all goods are equal, and that every good is choice-worthy in the highest degree and admits of neither remission nor intensification. And of existing things they say that some are goods, some are evils, and some are neither.

​Goods, then, are the virtues: prudence, justice, courage, temperance, and the rest; while evils are their opposites: foolishness, injustice, and the rest. And neither are all those things that neither benefit nor harm, such as life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, good repute, noble birth; and their opposites: death, disease, hardship, ugliness, weakness, poverty, disrepute, low birth, and things similar to these, as Hecato says in the seventh book of On the End, and Apollodorus in his Ethics, and Chrysippus. For these are not goods, but preferred indifferents in species.

​For just as it is proper to what is hot to heat and not to cool, so also it is proper to the good to benefit and not to harm; but wealth and health do not benefit any more than they harm; therefore neither wealth nor health is a good. Furthermore they say: that which can be used well and badly is not a good; but wealth and health can be used well and badly; therefore wealth and health are not a good. Posidonius, however, says that these also are among the goods. On the other hand, Hecato in the ninth book of On Goods and Chrysippus in his works On Pleasure say that pleasure is not a good either; for there are also base pleasures, and nothing base is a good.