Another thing that wasn’t immediately clear to me: are you comparing chicken lives to cow lives (by numerically distinct individuals), or chicken-years to cow-years? I think this is a significant difference since iirc the standard length of the life of a factory farmed chicken is on the order of 0.1 years, while I would guess that it’s higher for cows (but don’t recall a number off the top of my head).
Yes good question! Cow lives are longer, and cows are probably more “conscious” (I’m using that term loosely), but their treatment is generally better than that of chickens.
For this particular calculation, the “offset” isn’t just an abstract moral good, it’s attempting to decrease cow/chicken production respectively. E.g. you eat one chicken, donate to a fund that reduces the numbers of chickens produced by one, the net ethical impact is 0 regardless of farming conditions.
That convenience is part of the reason I chose to start with this analysis, but it’s certainly something I’ll have to consider for future work.
Another thing that wasn’t immediately clear to me: are you comparing chicken lives to cow lives (by numerically distinct individuals), or chicken-years to cow-years? I think this is a significant difference since iirc the standard length of the life of a factory farmed chicken is on the order of 0.1 years, while I would guess that it’s higher for cows (but don’t recall a number off the top of my head).
Yes good question! Cow lives are longer, and cows are probably more “conscious” (I’m using that term loosely), but their treatment is generally better than that of chickens.
For this particular calculation, the “offset” isn’t just an abstract moral good, it’s attempting to decrease cow/chicken production respectively. E.g. you eat one chicken, donate to a fund that reduces the numbers of chickens produced by one, the net ethical impact is 0 regardless of farming conditions.
That convenience is part of the reason I chose to start with this analysis, but it’s certainly something I’ll have to consider for future work.