The two are disanalogous from an offsetting perspective: Eating (factory farmed) animal products relatively directly results in an increase in animal suffering, and there is nothing that you can do to “undo” that suffering, even if you can “offset” it by donating to animal advocacy orgs. By contrast, if you cause some emissions and then pay for that amount of CO2 to be directly captured from the atmosphere, you’ve not harmed a single being.
This is only reasonable if you believe that causing x units of suffering and then preventing x units of suffering is worse than causing 0 suffering and allowing the other x units of suffering to continue. Actually, it’s probably wrong even with that premise. Suppose Alice spends a day doing vegan advocacy, so that ten people who would have each eaten one hamburger don’t eat them, but then she goes home and secretly eats ten hamburgers while no one is watching. Meanwhile, Brian leaves his air conditioner running while he’s away from home, emitting 1 ton of CO2, then realizes his mistake, feels guilty, and buys 1 ton of carbon offsets. In either case, there’s no more net harm than if both of them had done none of these actions, but according to your argument, Alice’s behavior is worse than Brian’s? Personally I consider these harms fungible and therefore Alice was net zero even if the hamburgers she ate came from a different cow than the ones the other people would’ve eaten.
Yes, that’s the narrowly utilitarian perspective (on the current margin). My point was that if you mix in even a little bit of common sense moral reasoning and/or moral uncertainty, causing x harm and preventing x harm is obviously more wrong than staying uninvolved. (To make this very obvious, imagine if someone beat their spouse but then donated to an anti-domestic abuse charity to offset this.) I guess I should have made it clearer that I wasn’t objecting to the utilitarian logic of it. But even from a purely utilitarian perspective, this matters because it can make a real difference to the optics of the behavior.
This is only reasonable if you believe that causing x units of suffering and then preventing x units of suffering is worse than causing 0 suffering and allowing the other x units of suffering to continue. Actually, it’s probably wrong even with that premise. Suppose Alice spends a day doing vegan advocacy, so that ten people who would have each eaten one hamburger don’t eat them, but then she goes home and secretly eats ten hamburgers while no one is watching. Meanwhile, Brian leaves his air conditioner running while he’s away from home, emitting 1 ton of CO2, then realizes his mistake, feels guilty, and buys 1 ton of carbon offsets. In either case, there’s no more net harm than if both of them had done none of these actions, but according to your argument, Alice’s behavior is worse than Brian’s? Personally I consider these harms fungible and therefore Alice was net zero even if the hamburgers she ate came from a different cow than the ones the other people would’ve eaten.
Yes, that’s the narrowly utilitarian perspective (on the current margin). My point was that if you mix in even a little bit of common sense moral reasoning and/or moral uncertainty, causing x harm and preventing x harm is obviously more wrong than staying uninvolved. (To make this very obvious, imagine if someone beat their spouse but then donated to an anti-domestic abuse charity to offset this.) I guess I should have made it clearer that I wasn’t objecting to the utilitarian logic of it. But even from a purely utilitarian perspective, this matters because it can make a real difference to the optics of the behavior.