Q. What is vice according to the law of nature?
A. It is the practice of actions prejudicial to the individual and to society.
Q. Have not virtue and vice an object purely spiritual and abstracted from the senses?
A. No; it is always to a physical end that they finally relate, and that end is always to destroy or preserve the body.
Q. Have vice and virtue degrees of strength and intensity?
A. Yes: according to the importance of the faculties, which they attack or which they favor; and according to the number of persons in whom those faculties are favored or injured.
Q. Give me some examples?
A. The action of saving a man's life is more virtuous than that of saving his property; the action of saving the lives of ten men, than that of saving only the life of one, and an action useful to the whole human race is more virtuous than an action that is only useful to one single nation.
Q. How does the law of nature prescribe the practice of good and virtue, and forbid that of evil and vice?
A. By the advantages resulting from the practice of good and virtue for the preservation of our body, and by the losses which result to our existence from the practice of evil and vice.