moral neighbours

"we can't have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbours,people we deal with and so on."
Who,then, is our neighbour?
.
.
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The only standard we could find for this is the concept of proximity. Our moral neighbours are those who are close to us,spatially or in some other recognised sense. Distant claims are simply not as powerful as those we can see before us. Those close claims are more vivid and therefore more real.

Excerpts from the novel "The sunday philosophy club"
by Alexander MacCall Smith

I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys a good philosophical mystery.

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