Hereâs the math on moral/âfinancial fungibility:
...
Youâre probably better off eating cow beef and donating the $6.03/âkg to the Good Food Institute
Is refraining from killing really morally fungible to killing + offsetting? Would it be morally permissible for someone to engage in murder if they agreed to offset that life by donating $5,000 to Malaria Consortium? I donât mean to be offensive with this analogy, but if we are to take seriously the pain/âsuffering that factory farming inflicts on animals, we should morally regard it in a similar lens to inflicting pain/âsuffering on humans.
So, no, moral acts are not necessarily fungible. It is better to not eat meat in the first place than to eat meat and donate the savings to farm animal charities (even if you could save more animals). This is obvious from a rights moral framework but even consequentialists would consider financial offsetting dangerous and unpalatable. The consequences of allowing people to engage in immoral acts + offsetting would be a treacherous and ultimately inferior world.
So your calculations are not the cost of eating meat but rather, the cost of saving animals. You have not estimated the cost of chicken/âcow suffering (which would require estimating utility functions and animal preferences), but rather, the cost of alleviating suffering. Your low-cost numbers donât imply that eating meat is inconsequential, but rather, that itâs very cost-effective to help chickens and cows. GiveWellâs $5,000 per human life doesnât make human life cheap or murder trivial, it means we have an extraordinary opportunity to help others at a very low cost to ourselves.
Yes thatâs a good point, as Scott argues in the linked post:
The moral of the story is: if thereâs some kind of weird market failure that causes galaxies to be priced at $1, normal reasoning stops working; things that do incalculable damage can be fairly described as âonly doing $1 worth of damageâ, and you will do them even if less damaging options are available.
Give Well notes that their analysis should only really be taken a relative measure of cost-effectiveness. But even putting that aside, youâre right that it doesnât imply human lives are cheap or invaluable.
Actually, I pretty much agree with all your points. But a better analogy might be âis it okay to murder someone to prevent another murder?â Thatâs a much fuzzier line, and you can extend this to all kinds of absurd trolly-esque scenarios. In the animal case, itâs not that Iâm murdering someone in cold blood and then donating some money. Itâs that Iâm causing one animal to be produced, and then causing another animal not to be. So it is much closer to equivalent.
To be clear again, the specific question this analysis address is not âis it ethical to eat meat and then pay offsetsâ. The question is âassuming you pay for offsets, is it better to eat chicken or beef?â
And of course, there are plenty of reasons murder seems especially repugnant. You wouldnât want rich people to be able to murder people effectively for free. You wouldnât want people getting revenge on their coworkers. You wouldnât want to allow a world where people have to life in fear, etc etc etc. So I donât think itâs a particularly useful intuition pump.
To be clear again, the specific question this analysis address is not âis it ethical to eat meat and then pay offsetsâ. The question is âassuming you pay for offsets, is it better to eat chicken or beef?â
(FWIW, this might be worth emphasizing more prominently. When I first read this post and the landing page, it took me a while to understand what question you were addressing.)
Is refraining from killing really morally fungible to killing + offsetting? Would it be morally permissible for someone to engage in murder if they agreed to offset that life by donating $5,000 to Malaria Consortium? I donât mean to be offensive with this analogy, but if we are to take seriously the pain/âsuffering that factory farming inflicts on animals, we should morally regard it in a similar lens to inflicting pain/âsuffering on humans.
So, no, moral acts are not necessarily fungible. It is better to not eat meat in the first place than to eat meat and donate the savings to farm animal charities (even if you could save more animals). This is obvious from a rights moral framework but even consequentialists would consider financial offsetting dangerous and unpalatable. The consequences of allowing people to engage in immoral acts + offsetting would be a treacherous and ultimately inferior world.
So your calculations are not the cost of eating meat but rather, the cost of saving animals. You have not estimated the cost of chicken/âcow suffering (which would require estimating utility functions and animal preferences), but rather, the cost of alleviating suffering. Your low-cost numbers donât imply that eating meat is inconsequential, but rather, that itâs very cost-effective to help chickens and cows. GiveWellâs $5,000 per human life doesnât make human life cheap or murder trivial, it means we have an extraordinary opportunity to help others at a very low cost to ourselves.
Yes thatâs a good point, as Scott argues in the linked post:
Give Well notes that their analysis should only really be taken a relative measure of cost-effectiveness. But even putting that aside, youâre right that it doesnât imply human lives are cheap or invaluable.
Actually, I pretty much agree with all your points. But a better analogy might be âis it okay to murder someone to prevent another murder?â Thatâs a much fuzzier line, and you can extend this to all kinds of absurd trolly-esque scenarios. In the animal case, itâs not that Iâm murdering someone in cold blood and then donating some money. Itâs that Iâm causing one animal to be produced, and then causing another animal not to be. So it is much closer to equivalent.
To be clear again, the specific question this analysis address is not âis it ethical to eat meat and then pay offsetsâ. The question is âassuming you pay for offsets, is it better to eat chicken or beef?â
And of course, there are plenty of reasons murder seems especially repugnant. You wouldnât want rich people to be able to murder people effectively for free. You wouldnât want people getting revenge on their coworkers. You wouldnât want to allow a world where people have to life in fear, etc etc etc. So I donât think itâs a particularly useful intuition pump.
(FWIW, this might be worth emphasizing more prominently. When I first read this post and the landing page, it took me a while to understand what question you were addressing.)