Last December, the author and philosopher Sam Harris invited Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, to appear on his podcast, “Waking Up.” It was Bloom’s third stint as a guest, and, as before, the two men devoted a significant portion of their conversation to the subject of empathy. Bloom had just published a book, “Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion,” in which he drew a distinction between empathy (the ability to feel other people’s pain) and compassion (desiring others’ well-being); according to Bloom, society needs less of the former and more of the latter. On the podcast, he and Harris talked about how empathy favors people you know over people you don’t, and how this favoritism leads to harmful behaviors such as tribalism and nationalism. They advocated a cooler, more rational approach to moral decision-making. Then they asked how far such an approach could be taken.

Some forms of preferential treatment, Harris and Bloom noted, are considered appropriate, as when parents love their children more than they do strangers. But they wondered whether this, too, might be a behavior that requires correcting. They cited the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, who famously pointed out that spending money on non-essentials means valuing your comfort over the lives of people starving elsewhere in the world. Bloom admitted that he buys toys and vacations for his children, identifying this as a moral dilemma that we all face. He and Harris engaged in a thought experiment: Would the world be improved if parents cared for other people just as much as they cared for their own children?

As evidence that such a perspective is possible, Harris brought up a Hindu guru he had once met, known as Poonja-ji, who had achieved such a degree of universal love that he reacted to the news of his own son’s death no differently than he reacted to the news of anyone else’s death. Neither Harris nor Bloom seriously advocated that all people adopt a similar attitude, but neither did they immediately dismiss the idea of a world in which this is the norm. Harris said that he was agnostic regarding whether such a world would be better or not. Bloom, noting that slavery was once considered natural, said, “We need to step back and look at what will future generations say, what will we say when we are at our best selves?”

I found this a striking suggestion. It’s not unusual, when thinking about the future, to wonder which of our contemporary values will one day seem backward or naïve. And given the trend of expanding our circle of moral concern, it’s fairly common to see predictions that we will eventually grant legal protections to animals and even artificial intelligences. But the idea that we might one day become so absolutely impartial in our affection that we would care as much about strangers as we do about our own children? That was new to me.

What it made me think of was eusociality, the coöperative behavior exhibited by a number of insects, including ants, termites, and bees, and by mammals such as naked mole rats. The biologist E. O. Wilson, the world’s leading expert on ants, has described humans as eusocial apes because of our ability to coöperate on a large scale, though many of his colleagues don’t think we meet the technical criteria. It’s certainly true that there has been a historical trend of humans organizing into ever larger groups, from villages of hundreds up to nations of millions, with individuals contributing—at least part of the time—toward the group’s interests instead of working solely for their own. While we’ve seen some reversals of this in the past year or two—including Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the resurgence of the xenophobic right—it’s not unreasonable to believe that these are temporary setbacks, blips in a broader trend that obtains over centuries or millennia. If this trend continues in the future, it could end in a kind of species-wide eusociality, at which point the perfectly impartial affection that Harris and Bloom posit might no longer seem so outlandish.

Would this be a utopia? Presumably it would mean an end to war. And it wouldn’t require an erasure of individuality, which is what people usually fear when envisioning insect-like hive minds (see the Borg, from “Star Trek”). People could retain their own personalities; all they would have to do is be fully committed to the idea that every life is equally valuable and thus equally deserving of their compassion. Starvation would disappear, because anyone who had extra money—including parents able to afford toys—would donate it to a stranger who didn’t have enough to eat. Let’s set aside the problem of how likely it is for every person on Earth to achieve a mental state currently found only in gurus, and focus instead on a single question: Is this desirable?

My feeling is that it is not, for the following reason: while Poonja-ji might have been a force for good in the world at large, you wouldn’t want to grow up with him as your father. An adult can choose to renounce personal relationships in service to an ideal, but that’s not a choice a child should be asked to make. And without that, the scenario of a world of perfectly impartial affection ceases to be a utopia. Instead, it’s a world in which children’s emotional well-being is sacrificed for the sake of their parents’ ideology.

As a child, you want your parent to favor you and your siblings over other people; this is the emotional core of being a family. In the book “Strangers Drowning,” Larissa MacFarquhar profiles a number of extreme altruists, including a married couple who adopted twenty-two children. The parents’ affection was so broad that they would sometimes welcome children whom they hadn’t adopted to live with them. When they “included these unofficial kids in intimate family occasions, the official kids would object,” MacFarquhar writes. “What did family mean if everyone was included?”

Social conditioning isn’t enough to remove children’s desire for parental affection. Consider the kibbutzim, the Israeli agricultural communities that began in the early twentieth century as a utopian experiment in collectivism. One of the notable features of life on the kibbutzim of the past was collective child-rearing, in which even young children spent relatively little time with their parents and mostly lived in communal buildings. It was believed that this would be better both for parents and for children. Over time, though, the practice gradually waned; by the nineteen-nineties, it was almost completely gone. According to Noam Shpancer, who was born and raised on a kibbutz, “The move was in large part driven by women who grew up in the children’s house and, having become mothers, refused to let their children experience that same system.”

Harris and Bloom’s proposed idea of perfectly impartial affection also reminded me of the transhumanist movement, which sees technological enhancement as the next stage of human evolution. Transhumanists often imagine a future in which we are free of the limitations imposed by our bodies. If one day we upload our consciousnesses into the cloud and exist only as incorporeal intellects, then it would indeed be meaningless to distinguish between a person next to us and a person ten thousand miles away. But as long as we are bound to our bodies, a history of physical closeness and contact will remain important to us. That means children will prefer their parents to strangers, and they deserve to have their parents reciprocate that feeling.

It’s entirely possible that future generations will have higher ethical standards than we do, and that they will recognize obligations that we are ignoring now. But I don’t think such moral progress will come about purely as a result of better arguments about abstract ideals. It will also require that people have the kind of empathy that results from emotional well-being. And that well-being comes, in part, from having their needs met when they were children.