I asked Will about that exact section about the offsetting and he said it was an argument from a nonconsequentialist position and that it doesn’t go through at all from a utilitarian viewpoint.
I think one important distinction to make is whether causing some harm is instrumental to causing greater good. In the trolley problem I need to kill one person in order to kill another person. In the case of meat eating I do not need to kill animals for consumption in order to donate to THL, so I would have no excuse if I did it.
Note that I in the previous paragraph really refers to me. Meat-eaters have repeatedly made the case that forgoing meat would strain their willpower and reduce their quality of life. I attribute it to typical mind fallacy that this seems odd to me.
Some EAs have written about offsetting recently, Jeff and Scott among them. Well targeted offsetting fundraising could even solve a number of problems for farmed animal activism, and would be expedient at the moment. I’ve argued this here.
Thanks Telofy, that makes sense, but I was referring more to the fact that Will seems to argue that carbon offsetting is good but meat offsetting is completely different and wrong. All I’m saying is that I think they’re more or less the same, one is just more damaging than the other.
The difference between carbon offsetting and meat offsetting is that carbon offsetting doesn’t involve causing harms, while meat offsetting does.
Most people would consider it immoral to murder someone for reasons of personal convenience, even if you make up for it by donating to a ‘murder offset’, such as, let’s say, a police department. MacAskill is saying that ‘animal murder’ offsetting is like this, because you are causing harm to animals, then attempting to ‘make up for it’ by helping other animals. Climate offsets are different because the offset prevents the harm from occurring in the first place.
Indeed, murder offsets would be okay from a purely consequentialist perspective. But this is not the trolley problem, for the reason that Telofy explains very well in his second paragraph above. Namely, the harmful act that you are tempted to commit is not required in order to achieve the good outcome.
I asked Will about that exact section about the offsetting and he said it was an argument from a nonconsequentialist position and that it doesn’t go through at all from a utilitarian viewpoint.
I think one important distinction to make is whether causing some harm is instrumental to causing greater good. In the trolley problem I need to kill one person in order to kill another person. In the case of meat eating I do not need to kill animals for consumption in order to donate to THL, so I would have no excuse if I did it.
Note that I in the previous paragraph really refers to me. Meat-eaters have repeatedly made the case that forgoing meat would strain their willpower and reduce their quality of life. I attribute it to typical mind fallacy that this seems odd to me.
Some EAs have written about offsetting recently, Jeff and Scott among them. Well targeted offsetting fundraising could even solve a number of problems for farmed animal activism, and would be expedient at the moment. I’ve argued this here.
Thanks Telofy, that makes sense, but I was referring more to the fact that Will seems to argue that carbon offsetting is good but meat offsetting is completely different and wrong. All I’m saying is that I think they’re more or less the same, one is just more damaging than the other.
The difference between carbon offsetting and meat offsetting is that carbon offsetting doesn’t involve causing harms, while meat offsetting does.
Most people would consider it immoral to murder someone for reasons of personal convenience, even if you make up for it by donating to a ‘murder offset’, such as, let’s say, a police department. MacAskill is saying that ‘animal murder’ offsetting is like this, because you are causing harm to animals, then attempting to ‘make up for it’ by helping other animals. Climate offsets are different because the offset prevents the harm from occurring in the first place.
Indeed, murder offsets would be okay from a purely consequentialist perspective. But this is not the trolley problem, for the reason that Telofy explains very well in his second paragraph above. Namely, the harmful act that you are tempted to commit is not required in order to achieve the good outcome.