Unless provoked...................

 In the eighteenth century, the liberal idea aborning was that every person regardless of age or gender of ethnicity or position in the hierarchy should have equal rights.  Such an idea of equality was still to most people shocking.  About gender, for example, it was inconceivable even to the Founding Brothers.  In earlier centuries of agriculture and its accompanying hierarchy, topped by the stationary bandits in charge, a liberal equality was held in fact to be absurd and dangerous.  Justice was a matter of treating a duke as a duke and a plowman as a plowman, with the differing respect owed in justice to each—but certainly not equality.  You bowed low to a duke.  And you did not murder a plowman, unless provoked.

-Deidre Nansen McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works:  How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World For All