Thank you! This is a very practical way to get people to do something. Though I will admit, I get an odd feeling about sharing it, because I feel rather dogmatic about not harming animals. I am working on this, because I know that 50% of the world eating half as much meat is more likely to happen than 50% of the world going vegan. And if the former happens, it’s overall better for the animals.
I totally relate with the emotional difficulty of putting aside feelings about others harming animals in order to best enable them to make the world better, in whatever ways are both realistic and most impactful for them. It’s hard! But I think it’s really important and I think is making me a more effective advocate within my real-world social interactions
It’s clearly better in the short term. I think it’s less clearly better in the long term: eating meat makes people more likely to deny the relevance of animal minds, so their motivation to promote animal welfare might not be sustained in the long run. Conversely, this effect might cause people who go vegan to actually become increasingly non-speciesist over time (I’m extrapolating from the results of the study, but I think it’s a fair assumption).
I haven’t read more than the abstract of the referenced article, as access is restricted, but the abstract suggests that the reason that people deny the existence of animal minds is due to their dissonance between not wanting to cause harm to things that have minds and enjoying eating meat. Imposing offsets on oneself would seem to reconcile this dissonance: you enjoy an activity that causes harm and because you have this aversion to harm you couple that with an activity that has commensurate harm reduction.
Although it is possible that meat consumption with offsets could have a corrosive effect on one’s perception of animals as moral patients, I would not infer this from the linked article, based on the psychological mechanisms described in the abstract.
But I doubt most people are so rational. Climate offsets present an importantly different case—at least some are a true offset, where no more carbon is added to the atmosphere, so no additional or different harm is done. With animal offsetting, no more harm is done, but a different harm is. Most people would still feel bad about causing harm to that particular individual—and so they will still be insentivized to deny their moral relevance, even if they offset.
So I think this is likely to vary by person, depending on how tied their emotional response is to individuals vs abstract suffering.
I don’t know that the contrast between climate and animal offsets is so strong. The harm caused by consuming animal products is also indirect in most cases in relation to the consumer: the animal consumed is already dead and has already suffered whatever harms the factory farming system inflicted on it, so your action harms it no further. The harm you are actually doing are increasing the demand for the product.
The set of people eating meat that choose to offset and those that choose not to probably have a very different psychological environment regarding the animals consumed, I would think.
Thank you! This is a very practical way to get people to do something. Though I will admit, I get an odd feeling about sharing it, because I feel rather dogmatic about not harming animals. I am working on this, because I know that 50% of the world eating half as much meat is more likely to happen than 50% of the world going vegan. And if the former happens, it’s overall better for the animals.
I totally relate with the emotional difficulty of putting aside feelings about others harming animals in order to best enable them to make the world better, in whatever ways are both realistic and most impactful for them. It’s hard! But I think it’s really important and I think is making me a more effective advocate within my real-world social interactions
It’s clearly better in the short term. I think it’s less clearly better in the long term: eating meat makes people more likely to deny the relevance of animal minds, so their motivation to promote animal welfare might not be sustained in the long run. Conversely, this effect might cause people who go vegan to actually become increasingly non-speciesist over time (I’m extrapolating from the results of the study, but I think it’s a fair assumption).
I haven’t read more than the abstract of the referenced article, as access is restricted, but the abstract suggests that the reason that people deny the existence of animal minds is due to their dissonance between not wanting to cause harm to things that have minds and enjoying eating meat. Imposing offsets on oneself would seem to reconcile this dissonance: you enjoy an activity that causes harm and because you have this aversion to harm you couple that with an activity that has commensurate harm reduction.
Although it is possible that meat consumption with offsets could have a corrosive effect on one’s perception of animals as moral patients, I would not infer this from the linked article, based on the psychological mechanisms described in the abstract.
Right, I agree that’s possible.
But I doubt most people are so rational. Climate offsets present an importantly different case—at least some are a true offset, where no more carbon is added to the atmosphere, so no additional or different harm is done. With animal offsetting, no more harm is done, but a different harm is. Most people would still feel bad about causing harm to that particular individual—and so they will still be insentivized to deny their moral relevance, even if they offset.
So I think this is likely to vary by person, depending on how tied their emotional response is to individuals vs abstract suffering.
I don’t know that the contrast between climate and animal offsets is so strong. The harm caused by consuming animal products is also indirect in most cases in relation to the consumer: the animal consumed is already dead and has already suffered whatever harms the factory farming system inflicted on it, so your action harms it no further. The harm you are actually doing are increasing the demand for the product.
The set of people eating meat that choose to offset and those that choose not to probably have a very different psychological environment regarding the animals consumed, I would think.