I get much more than $0.43 of enjoyment out of a year’s worth of eating animal products
I think we would likely not justify a moral offset for harming humans at (by the numbers you posted) $100/year or eating children at $20/pound (100*15 years / 75 pounds). This isn’t due to sentimentality, deontology, taboo, or biting the bullet—I think a committed consequentialist, one grounded in practicality, would agree that no good consequences would likely come from allowing that sort of thing, and I think that this probably logically applies to meat.
I think overall it’s better to look first at the direct harm vs direct benefit, and how much you weigh the changes to your own experience against the suffering caused. The offset aspect is not unimportant, but I think it’s a bit misleading when not applied evenly in the other direction.
I am sympathetic to morally weighing different animals orders of magnitude differently. We have to do that in order to decide how to prioritize between different interventions.
That said, I don’t think human moral instincts for these sorts of cross-species trolley problems are well equipped for numbers bigger than 3-5. Your moral instincts can (I would say, accurately) inform you that you would rather avert harm to a person than to 5 chickens, but when you get into the 1000s you’re pretty firmly in torture vs dust specks territory and should not necessarily just trust your instincts. That doesn’t mean orders of magnitude differences are wrong, but it does mean they’re potentially subject to a lot of bias and inconsistency if not accompanied by some methodology.
I think we would likely not justify a moral offset for harming humans at (by the numbers you posted) $100/year or eating children at $20/pound (100*15 years / 75 pounds). This isn’t due to sentimentality, deontology, taboo, or biting the bullet—I think a committed consequentialist, one grounded in practicality, would agree that no good consequences would likely come from allowing that sort of thing, and I think that this probably logically applies to meat.
I think overall it’s better to look first at the direct harm vs direct benefit, and how much you weigh the changes to your own experience against the suffering caused. The offset aspect is not unimportant, but I think it’s a bit misleading when not applied evenly in the other direction.
I am sympathetic to morally weighing different animals orders of magnitude differently. We have to do that in order to decide how to prioritize between different interventions.
That said, I don’t think human moral instincts for these sorts of cross-species trolley problems are well equipped for numbers bigger than 3-5. Your moral instincts can (I would say, accurately) inform you that you would rather avert harm to a person than to 5 chickens, but when you get into the 1000s you’re pretty firmly in torture vs dust specks territory and should not necessarily just trust your instincts. That doesn’t mean orders of magnitude differences are wrong, but it does mean they’re potentially subject to a lot of bias and inconsistency if not accompanied by some methodology.