vices
Within the depth-psychology and philosophical corpus assembled in this library, ‘Vice’ occupies a pivotal diagnostic role: it is consistently treated not as a mere catalogue of moral failures but as a structural condition of the soul — an inner disorder, a deviation from measure, a failure of rational self-governance. The Platonic inheritance is foundational: Plato identifies vice with the soul’s internal strife, the rebellion of lower faculties against reason, and draws the governing analogy between vice and disease. Plotinus radicalizes this into a metaphysics of privation: vice is the soul’s secondary immersion in the Unmeasured, an epistemic and ontological deficiency rather than a positive power. The Stoic tradition, extensively documented through Long and Sedley, treats vice as the strict negation of virtue — an all-or-nothing condition of irrational inconsistency, rooted in ignorance — and links it explicitly to mental pathology. Graver’s study of Stoic emotion extends this into the psychology of volitional competence, noting that genuine vice requires the capacity for practical reasoning and thus cannot be ascribed to the brutish or the psychopathic. Across these positions, a persistent tension obtains between vice as willful moral failure and vice as constitutional incapacity, between the medical and the juridical frames. The term thus serves as a hinge between ethical theory, psychology of the passions, and therapeutic practice.
Vice, being an ignorance and a lack of measure in the Soul, is secondarily evil, not the Essential Evil, just as Virtue is not the Primal Good but is Likeness to The Good, or participation in it.
Plotinus situates vice as a secondary, derivative evil — the soul’s participation in unmeasure and ignorance — rather than an autonomous principle, structurally mirroring virtue’s relation to the Good.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
what is all this confusion and delusion but injustice, and intemperance and cowardice and ignorance, and every form of vice? … they are like disease and health; being in the soul just what disease and health are in the body.
Plato defines all forms of vice as the soul’s inner rebellion and disorder, establishing the foundational analogy between vice and bodily disease that pervades subsequent therapeutic ethics.
, Republic, -380thesis
Vice is the negation of virtue, and its principal characteristics were established by parity of reasoning: note the emphasis on ignorance and inconsistency… the Stoics’ practice of interpreting virtue and vice in terms of mental health.
Long and Sedley demonstrate that Stoic philosophy defines vice strictly as virtue’s negation — grounded in ignorance and psychic inconsistency — and frames the virtue/vice opposition as a paradigm of mental health and illness.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987thesis
nothing is in between virtue and vice, though the Peripatetics say that progress is in between these. For as, they say, a stick must be either straight or crooked, so a man must be either just or unjust.
The Stoic doctrine of the sharp binary between virtue and vice — with no intermediate state — is presented as the defining structural feature distinguishing Stoic from Peripatetic moral psychology.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987thesis
the notion of vice or suboptimal rationality requires the imputation of volitional competence. If the brutish agent lacks even the ordinary human capabilities for practical reasoning, then he or she may actually be free of vice.
Graver argues that Stoic vice is necessarily tied to volitional competence — those incapable of practical reasoning cannot be held genuinely vicious — linking the concept to moral responsibility and psychological capacity.
, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007thesis
punishment said by us to be a deliverance from the greatest of evils, which is vice? … And justice punishes us, and makes us more just, and is the medicine of our vice.
Plato’s Gorgias articulates vice as the greatest evil from which punishment delivers the soul, cementing the therapeutic-juridical model in which justice acts as medicine for the diseased soul.
, Gorgias, -380supporting
the unreasoning phase of the Soul accepts evil- unmeasure, excess and shortcoming, which bring forth licentiousness, cowardice and all other flaws of the Soul, all the states, foreign to the true nature, which set up false judgements.
Plotinus traces the soul’s vicious states to its merger with Matter and consequent subjection to unmeasure, identifying vice as the product of the Soul’s alienation from its own rational nature.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
while over-indulgence destroys the virtues, frugality destroys the stronghold of vice.
The Philokalia’s ascetic discourse treats vice as a fortress erected by bodily over-indulgence, with frugality as the therapeutic counter-force that dismantles it — mapping the vice/virtue opposition onto ascetic practice.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
virtue is an utterly self-sufficient art of living… Central to Stoic ethics is the claim that virtue is an utterly self-sufficient art of living.
By establishing virtue as entirely self-sufficient, this passage contextualizes vice as its absolute opposite — a total failure of the art of living — reinforcing the Stoic binary structure.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
By what right does he describe it using images that connote excess and cruelty, when all his argument has yet established is that it is a certain sort of judgment?
Nussbaum interrogates Seneca’s rhetorical conflation of passionate judgment with moral excess, indirectly touching on the conceptual boundary between passion and vice in Stoic-derived ethics.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994aside