In a world obsessed with fairness and impartiality, is it really wrong to favor those closest to us? Traditional moral theories like utilitarianism demand that we count everyone equally, from strangers on the other side of the globe to our next-door neighbors. But for moral sentimentalists, this is a radical mistake. Morality isn’t about abstract and detached reasoning, moral sentimentalists argue —it is about empathy and care. In this article, Michael Slote draws on David Hume, Carol Gilligan, and other moral philosophers to argue that prioritizing neighbors isn’t just natural —it’s a moral obligation.

The idea that the moral individual should judge situations impartially and act accordingly, and the more specific idea that everyone should count equally in such a reckoning, are probably familiar to most of you. In moral and political philosophy, this idea goes under the name of consequentialism, and in its most familiar and historically influential form, it is known as utilitarianism. Utilitarianism has seemed very powerful to many thinkers, and why not? Isn’t morality supposed to substitute impartiality for the self-interested and biased attitudes and actions that characterize so much of human life?

Actually, many different forms of utilitarianism have been advocated in moral and political philosophy, but I shall highlight the most familiar kind, which tells us that in every situation where we are called on to act, we ought to consider everyone equally and do what, in those terms, does the greatest good for the greatest number. However, the utilitarians who tell us this recognize how strongly their moral ideal works against ordinary people’s habits and feelings. We all have greater concern for members of our own family than for strangers, and greater concern for our neighbors than for people we have never met who are on the other side of the world. If we act in accordance with those preferences, we will often end up not doing what, impartially speaking, has the best results. Our actions will, to a considerable extent, favor our near and dear or our neighbors in a way that is inconsistent with an impartial equal concern for all human beings. (I will leave the issue of our treatment of animals to one side.)

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Does that mean that most or all of us frequently act on immoral tendencies? The utilitarian theorist of morality will tell us that it does, but there are some moral philosophies that disagree. Such philosophies say that a certain degree of partiality toward near and dear and toward neighbors is not only morally acceptable but morally better than acting according to the dictates of utilitarianism. In other words, impartialistic theories of what is morally obligatory have often been opposed by partialistic conceptions of the obligations of morality.