Quote Originally Posted by English assassin
It still seems inescapable that I do NOT regard the rest of the world as equal in all respects to my close relatives.
But you would probably agree it would be equally wrong if someone bombed some other poor kids rather than your own?

Equality as between people I do not know and don't much care about except in an abstract sense doesn't seem like much of a moral principle to me.
But aren't moral principles, like legal ones, rather abstract and impersonal? I think some kind of universality or anonymity is the cornerstone of most systems of morality. In practice, we will tend to favour our own but would that make it right? For example, if you interviewed for a job, would it be right to favour your brother? If you judged a case? Gave out a government contract? Set a tax code? Marked an exam paper?

And that makes me wonder about how I feel about my friends, other Londoners, other people who ride motorbikes, etc etc.
It is interesting how concepts like loyalty, family, patriotism, friendship etc are rather hard to square with a universalistic moral system. I suspect how you feel about people close or similar to you is important at a personal level, but perhaps not at a moral one.

There is a case for trying to find a less demanding moral code than a perfectly altruistic one, as if the code becomes too demanding that may allow us to dismiss it as irrelevant. But I am a little leery of going too far down that road and saying whatever we do in practice must be moral. Conscience probably should be uncomfortable at times.