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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: you, like a skilful weigher, put into the balance the pleasures and the
pains, and their nearness and distance, and weigh them, and then say which
outweighs the other. If you weigh pleasures against pleasures, you of
course take the more and greater; or if you weigh pains against pains, you
take the fewer and the less; or if pleasures against pains, then you choose
that course of action in which the painful is exceeded by the pleasant,
whether the distant by the near or the near by the distant; and you avoid
that course of action in which the pleasant is exceeded by the painful.
Would you not admit, my friends, that this is true? I am confident that
they cannot deny this.
He agreed with me.
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