People care about each other to the degree that the are connected to each other; we always care more about our own families and friends than strangers, which doesn’t mean that we don’t care or cannot be made to care about strangers, but once we start to interact and know them they are already inter-penetrating our own values-sphere, and therefore aren’t “strangers” anymore. We also naturally rank most of our relationships in terms of how much value we give to them and for how much value we get from them.
This point has been attacked particularly by leftist philosophy as a kind of subtle capitalization – namely that the fact that we care more about certain people than others is supposedly a kind of irrationality or flaw in our psyche, or the cause of the ills in the world, or the fact that we spend $50,000 on a new car while we could have bought a $10,000 used car and given the difference to charity, or that we would save our own child first before saving another child, etc. Sure, that giving to charity would have been great, and arguably there are many better uses to put $40,000 to than a new car, however that isn’t even the point. The point is simply that the way it works ontologically is how self-valuing describes the fact that beings interact by inter-penetrating each other’s values-spheres, and the interactive middle-spaces between are literally the feelings, values, motives, ideas, actions etc. that beings do/have/are.
When I am around another person and they make me feel good, that “good feeling” is literally the inter-penetrating valuation; it is as Fixed Cross said, that beings always add value around themselves, they give value, and the extent to which they do this is the value that others have for them. This isn’t some kind of capitalist principle or “enlightened self-interest”, this is much deeper, this is pure fucking existential ontic principle. The positive feeling of value and caring/concern we have for others is exactly and literally the giving-of-value of others’ own self-valuing, and nothing besides. It isn’t simply that our feelings and actions and inclinations are reflecting the exchanges of values, they are those values.
It isn’t a fallacy or a flaw that we aren’t able to care as much for some people as we do for others, it would be existentially, ontologically impossible for a being to care equally for all other beings; this naturally exposes a flaw within Buddhism, or at least a potential flaw, since Buddhism wants to push self-valuing universally and equally to all beings, but then again maybe the Buddhist method is a kind of edification system for a self-valuing and is actually ‘stretching’ it somehow or making it larger, more accurate, or whatever… I honestly don’t know. But right now I am not interested in Buddhism.
Feelings, care and concern, and compassion are the inter-penetration of values mutually into two or more self-valuing’s values-spheres; the neurophysiological, hormonal etc. aspects of our bodies and brains that activate and work while we have these feelings, these values activities, are simply transfer mechanisms for the values; the biological aspect derives from and as the values aspect, the logic is always central and fundamental, biology flows from logic and is simply a container for logic, for values. A “physical biological system” is simply a kind of secondary expression of values, of values-in-action, of mutualism of values, of transfer and engagement of values, all of which means simply that the pure logic is the primary domain, always. The “subjectivity” of these physical systems experiencing themselves, or what we sometimes call consciousness, is literally the self-experience of values as pertain to (a) self-valuing.
The other angle is that it represents a limitation or weakness of a self-valuing to have a narrow values-sphere and to have a ‘dense’ mutuality of values-penetration with other self-valuings such that it cannot really act or enact care, concern, compassion or feelings for others. We might call that sociopathy or simply “burnout”, or nihilism or whatever else label we want, but the underlying reality is that every self-valuing has a ratio of its size to its density, also a separate ratio of its actual size to its potential size and another for its actual density to its potential density, and these measures also vary from location and categorical type within the values-spheres and values-interactions, and are also affected by the situations in which self-valuings find themselves. Bottom line: it is very complex, and there is added value in expanding one’s self-valuing to encompass more than is typical for it, and there is loss of value in closing off the values-sphere and making it smaller or more dense. The ‘sphere’ is literally the values themselves, being is literally the values and nothing besides, likewise the feelings we have, the ideas, the things we say or believe, our motives, what we write, how we act, all of it is literally the values and nothing besides, as the “expressing” of them in a particular spatial-temporal structure that includes the individual, the world, and everything in between. But alongside the weakness of an over-dense values-sphere cutting off potential interactions is that the density of the sphere is, again, literally the values themselves, so we can’t simply dilute the sphere because the sphere is the values, and the values are the sphere; there is added value in having a less dense sphere, but bring down the density too much and you literally begin to stop existing.