This is where JD is wrong. Love isn’t a checklist—fully love your child, check; fully love your neighbor, check; fully love your community, check—then move on. That’s not how morality works.
Life isn’t a series of isolated tasks, neatly completed before moving to the next. Your obligation to your neighbor doesn’t begin only after your child has everything—it exists alongside it.
So what are these “needs” we’re talking about? Are we justifying excess of our children while others suffer? Are we confusing luxury with necessity? Ethics isn’t about filling one box, closing it, and moving to the next. It’s about understanding the balance of responsibility, not using one duty as an excuse to ignore another.
Just google “ordo amoris.” Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?