The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

the argument in a sense, but appetite does not. It is
therefore more disgraceful; for the man who is incontinent in
respect of anger is in a sense conquered by argument, while the
other is conquered by appetite and not by argument.
    (2) Further, we pardon people more easily for following natural
desires, since we pardon them more easily for following such
appetites as are common to all men, and in so far as they are
common; now anger and bad temper are more natural than the
appetites for excess, i.e. for unnecessary objects. Take for
instance the man who defended himself on the charge of striking his
father by saying ‘yes, but he struck his father, and he struck his,
and’ (pointing to his child) ‘this boy will strike me when he is a
man; it runs in the family’; or the man who when he was being
dragged along by his son bade him stop at the doorway, since he
himself had dragged his father only as far as that.
    (2) Further, those who are more given to plotting against others
are more criminal. Now a passionate man is not given to plotting,
nor is anger itself-it is open; but the nature of appetite is
illustrated by what the poets call Aphrodite, ‘guile-weaving
daughter of Cyprus’, and by Homer’s words about her ‘embroidered
girdle’:
And the whisper of wooing is there,
Whose subtlety stealeth the wits of the wise, how prudent
soe’er.
    Therefore if this form of incontinence is more criminal and
disgraceful than that in respect of anger, it is both incontinence
without qualification and in a sense vice.
    (4) Further, no one commits wanton outrage with a feeling of
pain, but every one who acts in anger acts with pain, while the man
who commits outrage acts with pleasure. If, then, those acts at
which it is most just to be angry are more criminal than others,
the incontinence which is due to appetite is the more criminal; for
there is no wanton outrage involved in anger.
    Plainly, then, the incontinence concerned with appetite is more
disgraceful than that concerned with anger, and continence and
incontinence are concerned with bodily appetites and pleasures; but
we must grasp the differences among the latter themselves. For, as
has been said at the beginning, some are human and natural both in
kind and in magnitude, others are brutish, and others are due to
organic injuries and diseases. Only with the first of these are
temperance and self-indulgence concerned; this is why we call the
lower animals neither temperate nor self-indulgent except by a
metaphor, and only if some one race of animals exceeds another as a
whole in wantonness, destructiveness, and omnivorous greed; these
have no power of choice or calculation, but they are departures
from the natural norm, as, among men, madmen are. Now brutishness
is a less evil than vice, though more alarming; for it is not that
the better part has been perverted, as in man,-they have no better
part. Thus it is like comparing a lifeless thing with a living in
respect of badness; for the badness of that which has no
originative source of movement is always less hurtful, and reason
is an originative source. Thus it is like comparing injustice in
the abstract with an unjust man. Each is in some sense worse; for a
bad man will do ten thousand times as much evil as a brute.
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7
    With regard to the pleasures and pains and appetites and
aversions arising through touch and taste, to which both
self-indulgence and temperance were formerly narrowed down, it
possible to be in such a state as to be defeated even by those of
them which most people master, or to master even those by which
most people are defeated; among these possibilities, those relating
to pleasures are incontinence and continence, those relating to
pains softness and endurance. The state of most people is
intermediate, even if they lean more towards the worse states.
    Now, since some pleasures are necessary while others are not,
and are necessary up to a point while the excesses of them are not,
nor the deficiencies, and this is equally true of appetites and
pains, the man who pursues the excesses of things pleasant, or
pursues to excess necessary objects, and does so by choice, for
their own sake and not at all for the sake of any result distinct
from them, is self-indulgent; for such a man is of necessity
unlikely to repent, and therefore incurable, since a man who cannot
repent cannot be cured. The man who is deficient in his pursuit of
them is the opposite of