“Why do people respond to these misfortunes and not to others? … Rifkin and others have argued, plausibly, that moral progress involves expanding our concern from the family and the #tribe to #humanity as a whole. Yet it is impossible to empathize with seven billion strangers….. Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love”, share the same skin color or practice the same religion with.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/20/the-baby-in-the-well

And we would be wise, too, to afford them the same #dignity in times of misfortune, lest the disparate treatment causes the gap in/focus on differences to grow wider, and potential for conflict to grow greater.