The rational faculty further recognizes that whenever one commits injustice, people will come to hate and oppose him—aside from his knowledge that Allah will punish him.
Someone might object: “A person may still take pleasure in something he regards as ugly, just as he may enjoy food or drink that he has seized unlawfully.” We answer: even if his body tastes a measure of pleasure, his heart and intellect do not; they delight only when he acts justly. And supposing he does feel a momentary pleasure, he later suffers at the ugliness of its consequence in his own estimation. If he does not feel that pain, it is only because his intellect is absent from perceiving what would wound him—just as a drunkard may encounter things that should hurt him yet feels nothing because his mind fails to register them.
Ibn Sīnā himself alludes to this. In his “Section on Joy and Happiness” he writes: “The common imagination may first suppose that the strongest and loftiest pleasures are the sensory ones, and that all others are feeble; yet all of this is mere fancy without reality.”
One may take a person among them who still possesses some discernment and ask: “Are not the keenest pleasures you describe of this sort—sexual gratification, food, and their likes? Yet you know that someone absorbed in the pursuit of victory, even in something petty such as chess or backgammon, may have a willing partner or delicious food placed before him and still reject them, satisfied instead with the imagined sweetness of triumph. Likewise, a man who seeks chastity and prestige—sound in body and surrounded by attendants—may have food and a sexual opportunity presented to him, yet he draws back out of regard for decorum; in that circumstance, maintaining decorum is without doubt more precious and more delightful to him than intercourse or food.”
Similarly, when people of noble character are offered the pleasure of bestowing a favor upon one who truly deserves it, they prefer that pleasure to indulging a coveted animal appetite; indeed, they put others ahead of themselves and hasten to confer the benefit.