“The Preservationist holds that, to save others from suffering truly serious losses, like the loss of life or limb, often it's wrong to lie, and to cheat, and to steal, even though nobody will ever suffer much from your doing any of that. By contrast, the Liberationist holds that, when necessary to lessen serious suffering, then, provided nobody suffers seriously in consequence of your so doing, it's always morally good to do all those unruly things and more.”
Source: Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (1996), p. 13
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Peter Unger 3
American philosopher 1942Related quotes

“Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.”
Source: Pride and Prejudice
" Morals, Reason and Animals: Steve Sapontzis Interviewed by Claudette Vaughan https://web.archive.org/web/20100114161007/http:/www.abolitionist-online.com/08_steve_sapontzis.shtml", Abolitionist Online (2009)

The Art of Peace (1992)
Context: The real Art of Peace is not to sacrifice a single one of your warriors to defeat an enemy. Vanquish your foes by always keeping yourself in a safe and unassailable position; then no one will suffer any losses. The Way of a Warrior, the Art of Politics, is to stop trouble before it starts. It consists in defeating your adversaries spiritually by making them realize the folly of their actions. The Way of a Warrior is to establish harmony.

“As God hath ordained, so do; else thou wilt suffer chastisement and loss. Askest thou what loss?”
Golden Sayings of Epictetus
Context: Canst thou judge men?... then make us imitators of thyself, as Socrates did. Do this, do not do that, else will I cast thee into prison; this is not governing men like reasonable creatures. Say rather, As God hath ordained, so do; else thou wilt suffer chastisement and loss. Askest thou what loss? None other than this: To have left undone what thou shouldst have done: to have lost the faithfulness, the reverence, the modesty that is in thee! Greater loss than this seek not to find! (91).

In an interview shortly before he was killed, responding to a question by David Frost about how his obituary should read.
Context: Something about the fact that I made some contribution to either my country, or those who were less well off. I think back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this? I'd like to feel that I'd done something to lessen that suffering.

Interview at Big Sur, California http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/pau0int-1 (11 November 1990).
1990s
Context: I realized that more and more I was saying, "It seems to me that we have come to the time war ought to be given up. It no longer makes sense to kill 20 million or 40 million people because of a dispute between two nations who are running things, or decisions made by the people who really are running things. It no longer makes sense. Nobody wins. Nobody benefits from destructive war of this sort and there is all of this human suffering." And Einstein was saying the same thing of course. So that is when we decided — my wife and I — that first, I was pretty effective as a speaker. Second, I better start boning up, studying these other fields so that nobody could stand up and say, "Well, the authorities say such and such "