Among Christians there has been general agreement that loving concern should extend to all, including enemies, and that love in the heart should manifest itself in deeds. Concerning what those deeds should be there has been much less agreement. Indeed, Christians' views have diverged at every level of moral discernment – with respect to all actions, general types of action, specific types of action, and individual actions. At the second, next-to-most-general level, on which this study will focus, various Christian preference-rules vie for recognition or jostle for precedence. With respect to self and others, competing rules have varied from self-preference at one extreme to denial of all self-seeking at the other. With respect to specific categories of others, there has been somewhat greater consensus. Christians have agreed, for example, both that preference should go to one's nearest and dearest, to some extent, and that preference should go to the neediest, to some extent. However, to what extent? Suppose these two preferences come into conflict, as they frequently do, and nearest vie with neediest. What then?

A TROUBLING VERDICT

Philosophers as well as theologians have grappled with this question; and society at large has had its own, less formulated views. Some decades ago, the Cambridge philosopher A. C. Ewing remarked: “It is clear that the money spent by a man in order to provide his son with a university education could save the lives of many people who were perishing of hunger in a famine, yet most people would rather blame than praise a man who should deprive his son of a university education on this account.”