I think offsetting emissions and offsetting meat consumption are comparable under utilitarianism, but much less comparable under most deontological moral theories, if you think animals have rights. For instance, if you killed someone and donated $5,000 to the Malaria Consortium, that seems worse – from a deontological perspective – than if you just did nothing at all, because the life you kill and the life you save are different people, and many deontological theories are built on the “separateness of persons.” In contrast, if you offset your CO2 emissions, you’re offsetting your effect on warming, so you don’t kill anyone to begin with (because it’s not like your CO2 emissions cause warming that hurts agent A, and then your offset reduces temperatures to benefit agent B). It might be similarly problematic to offset your contribution to air pollution, though, because the effects of air pollution happen near the place where the pollution actually happened.
I believe the consequences of eating vegan are more plausibly characterized as falling under the domain of procreation ethics, rather than that of the ethics of killing. When you eat meat, the only difference you can reasonably expect to make is affecting how many farmed animals are born in the near future, since the fate of the ones that already exist in the farms is sealed (i.e. they’ll be killed no matter what) and can’t be affected by our dietary choices.
So I think, rather than factory farm offsets being similar to murdering someone and then saving others, they’re akin to causing someone’s birth in miserable conditions (who later dies prematurely), and then ‘offsetting’ that harm by preventing the suffering of hundreds of other human beings.
I submit that offsetting still feels morally questionable in this scenario, but at least my intuitions are less clear here.
I didn’t say they fell under the ethics of killing, I was using killing as an example of a generic rights violation under a plausible patient-centered deontological theory to illustrate the difference between “a rights violation happening to one person and help coming for a separate person as an offset” and “one’s harm being directly offset.”
(I agree that it seems a bit more unclear if potential people can have rights, even if they can have moral consideration, and in particular rights to not be brought into existence, but I think it’s very plausible.)
Note, however, that I think the question of whether there can be deontic side-constraints regarding our treatment of animals is unclear even conditioning on deontology. Many deontologist philosophers – like Huemer – are uncertain whether animals have “rights” (as a patient-centered deontologist would put it), even though they think (1) humans have rights and (2) animals are still deserving of moral consideration. Deontologists sometimes resort to something like “deontology for people, consequentialism for animals” (although some other deontologists, like Nozick, thought that this was insufficient for animals).
I think offsetting emissions and offsetting meat consumption are comparable under utilitarianism, but much less comparable under most deontological moral theories, if you think animals have rights. For instance, if you killed someone and donated $5,000 to the Malaria Consortium, that seems worse – from a deontological perspective – than if you just did nothing at all, because the life you kill and the life you save are different people, and many deontological theories are built on the “separateness of persons.” In contrast, if you offset your CO2 emissions, you’re offsetting your effect on warming, so you don’t kill anyone to begin with (because it’s not like your CO2 emissions cause warming that hurts agent A, and then your offset reduces temperatures to benefit agent B). It might be similarly problematic to offset your contribution to air pollution, though, because the effects of air pollution happen near the place where the pollution actually happened.
I believe the consequences of eating vegan are more plausibly characterized as falling under the domain of procreation ethics, rather than that of the ethics of killing. When you eat meat, the only difference you can reasonably expect to make is affecting how many farmed animals are born in the near future, since the fate of the ones that already exist in the farms is sealed (i.e. they’ll be killed no matter what) and can’t be affected by our dietary choices.
So I think, rather than factory farm offsets being similar to murdering someone and then saving others, they’re akin to causing someone’s birth in miserable conditions (who later dies prematurely), and then ‘offsetting’ that harm by preventing the suffering of hundreds of other human beings.
I submit that offsetting still feels morally questionable in this scenario, but at least my intuitions are less clear here.
I didn’t say they fell under the ethics of killing, I was using killing as an example of a generic rights violation under a plausible patient-centered deontological theory to illustrate the difference between “a rights violation happening to one person and help coming for a separate person as an offset” and “one’s harm being directly offset.”
(I agree that it seems a bit more unclear if potential people can have rights, even if they can have moral consideration, and in particular rights to not be brought into existence, but I think it’s very plausible.)
Note, however, that I think the question of whether there can be deontic side-constraints regarding our treatment of animals is unclear even conditioning on deontology. Many deontologist philosophers – like Huemer – are uncertain whether animals have “rights” (as a patient-centered deontologist would put it), even though they think (1) humans have rights and (2) animals are still deserving of moral consideration. Deontologists sometimes resort to something like “deontology for people, consequentialism for animals” (although some other deontologists, like Nozick, thought that this was insufficient for animals).