I don’t think 1) is correct—specificity matters in moral frameworks that aren’t purely utilitarian.
Consider two scenarios:
I kill a chicken eat it, then offer to buy my neighbor a vegan lunch the next 3 days who would otherwise have gotten chicken.
I release a canister of R22 into the atmosphere, then pay tradewater to acquire and destroy a canister’s worth of R22 that would otherwise have been emitted.
In both cases you can say on net there was zero impact. But there is a clear sentient being harmed in one case and not the other. That distinction is similar to why people aren’t okay with doctors killing a healthy patient and giving their organs to others, even if it on net saves lives. Put another way, it is possible to wholly offset one’s emissions in a that has zero impact. The same can’t be said for non-vegan diets.
In the typical case of meat-eating, the animal suffering has already happened by the time you choose to consume the product of it. At the point of consumption, there’s nothing you can do to change that. Forgoing meat consumption merely reduces the expected future quantity of animal suffering. Paying someone else to reduce their meat consumption by an equivalent or greater amount does the same thing.
I don’t think 1) is correct—specificity matters in moral frameworks that aren’t purely utilitarian. Consider two scenarios:
I kill a chicken eat it, then offer to buy my neighbor a vegan lunch the next 3 days who would otherwise have gotten chicken.
I release a canister of R22 into the atmosphere, then pay tradewater to acquire and destroy a canister’s worth of R22 that would otherwise have been emitted.
In both cases you can say on net there was zero impact. But there is a clear sentient being harmed in one case and not the other. That distinction is similar to why people aren’t okay with doctors killing a healthy patient and giving their organs to others, even if it on net saves lives. Put another way, it is possible to wholly offset one’s emissions in a that has zero impact. The same can’t be said for non-vegan diets.
In the typical case of meat-eating, the animal suffering has already happened by the time you choose to consume the product of it. At the point of consumption, there’s nothing you can do to change that. Forgoing meat consumption merely reduces the expected future quantity of animal suffering. Paying someone else to reduce their meat consumption by an equivalent or greater amount does the same thing.