As a vegan I agree with Marcus and Jeff’s takes but also think at least carnitarianism (not eating fish) is justifiable on pure utilitarian grounds. The 5 cent offset estimate is miles off (by a factor of 50-100) for fish and shrimp here, and this is how your argument falls.
I made a rough model that suggests a 100g cooked serving for farmed carp is ~1.1 years in a factory farm, and that of farmed shrimp is ~6 years in a factory farm. I modelled salmon and it came out much lower than this, but I expect this to grow when I factor in the fact salmon are carnivorous and farmed fish are used in salmon fish feed.
This is a lot of time, and it’s more expensive to pay for offsets that cover a longer time period. We have two main EA-aligned options for aquaculture ‘offsets’, one is the Fish Welfare Initiative, which (iirc) improves the life of a single fish across its lifetime for a marginal dollar, and the other is the Shrimp Welfare Project, which improves the death (a process lasting 3-5 minutes) of 1000 shrimp per year for a marginal dollar (we don’t know how good their corporate campaigns will be yet).
I’m really not sure how good it is for a carp to have a lower stocking density and higher water quality, which is FWI’s intervention in India, and essentially the best case for FWI’s effectiveness. If we assume it’s a 30% reduction in lifetime pain we can offset a fish meal for roughly $3.33.
I don’t think it’s good to prevent 1 year of shrimp suffocation and then go off and cause shrimp to spend 100 years in farmed conditions (which are really bad, to be clear). Biting the bullet on that and assuming a stunner lasts 20 years and no discount rate, to offset a single shrimp meal you’d have to pay $4.6 (nearly 100 times more than the estimate you used).
Maybe you could offset using a different species (chicken, through corporate commitments). Vasco Grilo thinks a marginal dollar gets you 2 years of chicken life in factory farms averted. Naively I’d think that chicken lives are better than shrimp lives, but shrimp matter slightly less morally. This time you probably have to pay $3 to offset a shrimp meal using the easiest species to influence.
Additionally, the lead time on offsets is long (I would think at least five years from a donation to a corporate commitment being implemented). It’s not good to have an offset that realises most of its value 20 years from now when, by then, there is a much higher chance of lab grown meat being cheaper or animal welfare regulations being better.
I think that you should at least be carnitarian because this is incredibly easy and based on my modelling (second sheet) it’s the vast majority (90-95%) of the (morally adjusted) time saved in factory farms associated with vegetarianism. I doubt that any person gets $4 of utility from eating a different kind of meat, and this just adds up over time.
As a vegan I agree with Marcus and Jeff’s takes but also think at least carnitarianism (not eating fish) is justifiable on pure utilitarian grounds. The 5 cent offset estimate is miles off (by a factor of 50-100) for fish and shrimp here, and this is how your argument falls.
I made a rough model that suggests a 100g cooked serving for farmed carp is ~1.1 years in a factory farm, and that of farmed shrimp is ~6 years in a factory farm. I modelled salmon and it came out much lower than this, but I expect this to grow when I factor in the fact salmon are carnivorous and farmed fish are used in salmon fish feed.
This is a lot of time, and it’s more expensive to pay for offsets that cover a longer time period. We have two main EA-aligned options for aquaculture ‘offsets’, one is the Fish Welfare Initiative, which (iirc) improves the life of a single fish across its lifetime for a marginal dollar, and the other is the Shrimp Welfare Project, which improves the death (a process lasting 3-5 minutes) of 1000 shrimp per year for a marginal dollar (we don’t know how good their corporate campaigns will be yet).
I’m really not sure how good it is for a carp to have a lower stocking density and higher water quality, which is FWI’s intervention in India, and essentially the best case for FWI’s effectiveness. If we assume it’s a 30% reduction in lifetime pain we can offset a fish meal for roughly $3.33.
I don’t think it’s good to prevent 1 year of shrimp suffocation and then go off and cause shrimp to spend 100 years in farmed conditions (which are really bad, to be clear). Biting the bullet on that and assuming a stunner lasts 20 years and no discount rate, to offset a single shrimp meal you’d have to pay $4.6 (nearly 100 times more than the estimate you used).
Maybe you could offset using a different species (chicken, through corporate commitments). Vasco Grilo thinks a marginal dollar gets you 2 years of chicken life in factory farms averted. Naively I’d think that chicken lives are better than shrimp lives, but shrimp matter slightly less morally. This time you probably have to pay $3 to offset a shrimp meal using the easiest species to influence.
Additionally, the lead time on offsets is long (I would think at least five years from a donation to a corporate commitment being implemented). It’s not good to have an offset that realises most of its value 20 years from now when, by then, there is a much higher chance of lab grown meat being cheaper or animal welfare regulations being better.
I think that you should at least be carnitarian because this is incredibly easy and based on my modelling (second sheet) it’s the vast majority (90-95%) of the (morally adjusted) time saved in factory farms associated with vegetarianism. I doubt that any person gets $4 of utility from eating a different kind of meat, and this just adds up over time.
love it