Even in countries where average income and wealth are much greater than in the world at large, most people take themselves to have a duty to show much more concern for the needs of compatriots than for the needs of foreigners in their political choices concerning tax-financed aid. For example, in the United States, most reflective, generally humane people who take the alleviation of poverty to be an important task of government think they have a duty to support laws that are much more responsive to neediness in the South Bronx than to neediness in the slums of Dacca. This patriotic bias has come to play a central role in the debate over universalist moralities, moralities whose fundamental principles prescribe equal concern or respect for all individuals everywhere and lay down no independent, fundamental duty toward people in a special relation to the agent. Particularists, that is, those who locate an independent principle of group loyalty in the foundations of morality, challenge universalists to justify the pervasive patriotic bias in tax-supported aid that is a deep-seated commitment of most of those who are, in general, attracted to universalism.

So far, universalist justifications of patriotic bias in aid have not risen to the particularist challenge. Granted (as Goodin noted in an important contribution to this debate), if someone has equal concern for all humanity everywhere, she will take certain considerations of efficiency to favor a worldwide system of institutional responsibilities including special responsibilities toward compatriots, as opposed to similarly needy foreigners.