Is it right if you are uncaring about people with whom you cannot form an emotional bond?

[Rebecca]

No, objectively we should care about everyone equally. Or should we? In fact the way we work now is quite effective - Sam Harris talks about this in The Moral Landscape. Society functions better as a whole if everyone is devoted first and foremost to their children and close kin and then others - if everyone cared as much about complete strangers as they did their own kids, kids would probably be less psychologically well balanced - they need complete focus for many years. Equally, family bonds, friendship bonds, neighbourhood bonds and national bonds etc help us to help each other - communities do work well for social mammals. The other side of this bonding we have evolved with is of course the tribalism and territorialism which leads to the dehumanising of others and things like war, racism, imperialism. I think the way we are going now is a good way. We are so much less racist and class conscious and imperialistic than we were 100 or even 50 years ago. I put this down to TV, cheap travel and media - there is much less 'us' and 'them' when you can see the starving children and war torn towns and empathise with them. The world is getting smaller and 'tribes' are getting bigger. We could well become one big race if religious and territorial disputes could be settled. We could help this along a bit more.