Caring may indeed be an advantage by inducing reciprocity in basic human interaction, but it has its limits. E.g. if you care about preserving biodiversity and

Caring may indeed be an advantage by inducing reciprocity in basic human interaction, but it has its limits. E.g. if you care about preserving biodiversity and you are confronted by unrelenting small and large scale consumerist headwind and its sequelae (instead of concerted consumption reduction), you know that what you care about will never happen. If you care about sophisticated, intelligent discussions about ethical issues and you see the idiotical, ephemeral turd that is the entertainment market/social media, you know it will never happen. When the thing you care about surpasses psychological everyday heuristics in scope your chances of it happening drop rapidly and the crowd to discuss it with becomes relatively negligible. It's how we fail to realize the vision of rational human governance in general and I suspect it's a limitation of our species.