The end goal is obviously to have everyone go vegan to eliminate animal suffering associated with consumption.
Let’s do a thought experiment and say that the whole world decides to eat meat and offset their meat consumption with donations. The effectiveness of such donations would plummet, as it’s becoming harder to convince people to go vegan. I’d see this as reason enough to be cautious.
That would increase the price of offsets, until you reached a level at which the cheapest offsets were things like in vitro meat research, or the new chicken-sexing technology that allows sexing of chicken eggs to avert the killing of billions of male layer chicks. Although those might be cheaper offsets than veganism promotion today already.
Fourth, and I think most important, the economics check out. Instead of universalizing the principle “become vegetarian”, suppose we tried to universalize the principle “find some way to be animal-neutral,” that is, live your life in such a way that on net you are not killing animals. And suppose everyone knew there were two strategies for doing this: either become vegetarian yourself, or offset your lifestyle by donating to advocacy organizations that convert other people to do so.
And suppose that, upon hearing that it only takes a $60 donation to offset their lifestyles, 90% of people choose the donation rather than the personal conversion. This makes the cost of outreach go up. That is, when I donate my $60, the advocacy organization uses it to convert Alice, who decides to donate $60 herself, which the advocacy organization uses to convert Bob, who decides to donate $60 himself, which the organization uses to convert Carol…and so on to the tenth person, who finally decides to become vegetarian themselves. If this happened, our premise that it takes the charity $60 to convert one new vegetarian would be false. In fact it takes them 10 donations of $60, or $600.
As long as people know that they have the option of offsetting via donation, the possibility that people would rather donate than become vegetarian themselves is priced into the cost of the offset. That means that if the cost of an offset is currently $60, it’s because we’re hitting people for whom $60 is genuinely their reserve price; they prefer becoming vegetarian to paying a $60 offset (probably for moral/symbolic reasons). These people are low-hanging fruit; once they’re exhausted, the offset price will rise, and people for whom vegetarianism is only a mild inconvenience will find themselves preferring to become vegetarian themselves rather than paying. Once even the middle-hanging fruit is exhausted, the price of the offset will be prohibitive and only the people for whom vegetarianism is an extraordinary inconvenience will continue to take that route. Once there are no more potential vegetarians left to convert, the offset cost will become the cost of saving animals via political action, improved technology (eg cultured meat), or changes to farming conditions.
This dynamic becomes even more interesting if you add the (unjustifiable but interesting) assumption that anyone not becoming vegetarian themselves is required to offset their choice by converting two other people to vegetarianism. Then you get a sort of virtuous Ponzi scheme which ends with a lot of vegetarians (albeit not necessarily in a reasonable amount of time).
I try to donate some money to an effective animal charity each year, above and beyond what I’ve pledged to donate for other reasons, in order to compensate for the remaining meat I refuse to cut out of my diet.
“once they’re exhausted, the offset price will rise, and people for whom vegetarianism is only a mild inconvenience will find themselves preferring to become vegetarian themselves rather than paying.”
Or they’ll just give up on the whole concept entirely, not wanting to pay $X OR give up meat.
The end goal is obviously to have everyone go vegan to eliminate animal suffering associated with consumption.
Let’s do a thought experiment and say that the whole world decides to eat meat and offset their meat consumption with donations. The effectiveness of such donations would plummet, as it’s becoming harder to convince people to go vegan. I’d see this as reason enough to be cautious.
That would increase the price of offsets, until you reached a level at which the cheapest offsets were things like in vitro meat research, or the new chicken-sexing technology that allows sexing of chicken eggs to avert the killing of billions of male layer chicks. Although those might be cheaper offsets than veganism promotion today already.
Scott Alexander:
“once they’re exhausted, the offset price will rise, and people for whom vegetarianism is only a mild inconvenience will find themselves preferring to become vegetarian themselves rather than paying.”
Or they’ll just give up on the whole concept entirely, not wanting to pay $X OR give up meat.