Book 5
11
but if a man does an injury of set purpose, he is guilty of injustice, and injustice of the sort that renders the doer an unjust man, if it be an act that violates proportion or equality. Similarly one who acts justly on purpose is a just man; but he acts justly only if he acts voluntarily.
12
Of involuntary actions some are pardonable and some are not. Errors not merely committed in ignorance but caused by ignorance are pardonable; those committed in ignorance, but caused not by that ignorance but by unnatural or inhuman passion, are unpardonable.
1
But it may perhaps be doubted whether our discussion of suffering and doing injustice has been sufficiently definite; and in the first place, whether the matter really is as Euripides has put it in the strange linesApparently from a dialogue between Alcmaeon and (possibly) Phegeus in the lost play of Euripides named after the former. Cf. 3.1.8.— I killed my mother—that’s the tale in brief! Were you both willing, or unwilling both? Is it really possible to suffer injusticei.e., to suffer wrong: for the wide sense of ἀδικεῖν see 1.1, note. voluntarily, or on the contrary is suffering injustice always involuntary, just as acting unjustly is always voluntary? And again, is suffering injustice always voluntary, or always involuntary, or sometimes one and sometimes the other?
