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Quote by Magnus Vinding

“... when we take into account what we know about happiness and suffering in psychological and neuroscientific terms, we find reasons to doubt that (to use Popper’s phrase) we can treat degrees of pain as “negative degrees of pleasure”, and to doubt that pleasure can ethically “cancel out” pain — any more than putting people far above a water surface can cancel out or outweigh the bad of putting people far below it.”

Quote by Magnus Vinding

Work

Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

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Magnus Vinding

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“I will say a few words about the connection of love and intellectual honesty. There are several different attitudes that may be adopted towards the spectacle of intolerable suffering. If you are a sadist, you may find pleasure in it; if you are completely detached, you may ignore it; if you are a sentamentalist, you may persuade yourself that it is not as bad as it seems; but if you feel genuine compassion you will try to apprehend the evil truly in order to be able to cure it. The sentimentalist will say that you are coldly intellectual, and that, if you really minded the sufferings of others, you could not be so scientific about them. The sentimentalist will claim to have a tenderer heart than yours, and will show it by letting the suffering continue rather than suffer himself.”

“She might never understand why the Almighty had allowed so much tragedy to befall her during the past two years, but she wasn't going to turn away from him as many people did when life got tough. She was going to cling tight to his promise that he would be with her always. And she was going to trust that one day soon, life would be bright again. Because if she didn't, the shadows hovering over her soul could swoop in and shroud her in darkness forever.”