Executive summary: The author presents leavenoharm.org, a website designed to make “moral offsetting” easy by calculating how much individuals should donate to specific charities to offset the negative impacts of their lifestyle, and argues that this approach is unlikely to increase harm and may encourage more overall good.
Key points:
The author was motivated by difficulty answering how much and to whom one should donate to offset measurable harms from personal lifestyle choices.
leavenoharm.org focuses on offsetting impacts from animal welfare, climate change, habitat destruction, and plastic waste using a single recommended fund per cause area.
The site offers a calculator to estimate required donations based on lifestyle inputs and a dashboard to track progress toward offsetting projected lifetime harm.
The author explicitly excludes many traditional EA cause areas, arguing that the site targets harms that scale with people living in surplus.
In response to critiques of moral offsetting, the author claims it is hard to imagine effective donations increasing suffering and hypothesizes that offsetting may create inertia toward further positive actions.
The author acknowledges uncertainty in the underlying estimates but prioritizes simple, confident numbers, with plans to improve automation, expand internationally, and reduce donation friction.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: The author presents leavenoharm.org, a website designed to make “moral offsetting” easy by calculating how much individuals should donate to specific charities to offset the negative impacts of their lifestyle, and argues that this approach is unlikely to increase harm and may encourage more overall good.
Key points:
The author was motivated by difficulty answering how much and to whom one should donate to offset measurable harms from personal lifestyle choices.
leavenoharm.org focuses on offsetting impacts from animal welfare, climate change, habitat destruction, and plastic waste using a single recommended fund per cause area.
The site offers a calculator to estimate required donations based on lifestyle inputs and a dashboard to track progress toward offsetting projected lifetime harm.
The author explicitly excludes many traditional EA cause areas, arguing that the site targets harms that scale with people living in surplus.
In response to critiques of moral offsetting, the author claims it is hard to imagine effective donations increasing suffering and hypothesizes that offsetting may create inertia toward further positive actions.
The author acknowledges uncertainty in the underlying estimates but prioritizes simple, confident numbers, with plans to improve automation, expand internationally, and reduce donation friction.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.