I applaud your efforts to understand this as I'm eager to also. It's a mentality or similar to one I've found myself in deadlock with before. For example, I asked a relative of mine if they would sacrifice themselves to save the lives of N number of people and there was no value of N they considered worth more than their own life. This relative found it uncomfortably easy to ignore and even justify the suffering of strangers. Not to say that the GP feels precisely this way. I'd hate to ascribe this particular belief to anybody that didn't directly espouse it.