[274] _compareant_ Anemoecius, Edd.; _comparant_ B H a b; _appareant_ c; _comparent_ p. [275] _idem_ Nonius, Müller, Heine; _autem_ B H a b; _item_ c, Bt. [276] _iis_ Baiter, Müller, Heine; _his_ B H a b; _hijs_ c. [277] _qui quidem_ many MSS., Bt.^1, Müller; _qui idem_ B H a b c; _qui [idem]_ Bt.^2, Heine. #The conflict between Expediency and Moral Rectitude only apparent.# *11* III. In regard to Panaetius's real intentions, therefore, no doubt can be entertained. But whether he was or was not justified in adding this third division to the inquiry about duty may, perhaps, be a matter for debate. For whether moral goodness is the only good, as the Stoics believe, or whether, as your Peripatetics think, moral goodness is in so far the highest good that everything else gathered together into the opposing scale would have scarcely the slightest weight, it is beyond question that expediency can never conflict with moral rectitude. And so, we have heard, Socrates used to pronounce a curse upon those who first drew a conceptual distinction between things naturally inseparable. With this doctrine the Stoics are in agreement in so far as they maintain that if anything is morally right, it is expedient, and if anything is not morally right, it is not expedient. *12* But if Panaetius were the sort of man to say that virtue is worth cultivating only because it is productive of advantage, as do certain philosophers who measure the desirableness of things by the standard of pleasure or of absence of pain, he might argue that expediency sometimes clashes with moral rectitude. But since he is a man who judges that the morally right is the only good, and that those things which come in conflict with it have only the appearance of expediency and cannot make life any better by their presence nor any worse by their absence, it follows that he ought not to have raised a question involving the weighing of what seems expedient against what is morally right. *13* Furthermore, when the Stoics speak of the supreme good as "living conformably to nature," they mean, as I take it, something like this: that we are always to be in accord with virtue, and from all other things that may be in harmony with nature to choose only such as are not incompatible with virtue. This being so, some people are of the opinion that it was not right to introduce this counterbalancing of right and expediency and that no practical instruction should have been given on this question at all.