The other problem with the “indirect enough” argument is that the donations are even more indirect
Sure, the meat people eat is usually killed long before it’s ordered and eating a few dozen chickens per year doesn’t individually shift an industry. But likewise, a $1000 donation doesn’t meaningfully affect an advocacy charity’s ability to win a court case.
Both only work in aggregate, and on a causal basis the link between meat demand and factory farming is much more robustly-established than advocacy charity income and relative absence of factory farms[1]
And standards for crediting impact need to be stricter here because multiple counting is a much more meaningful problem than when an altruistic donor is deciding where to donate
This is a good point too. If you’re using donations to prioritise in a counterfactual scenario, what part of the outcome is actually “your impact” is irrelevant. If you’re using them to buy indulgences, that’s less obviously the case.
on a money basis it’s less certain, but I still don’t think vegan diets are dramatically more expensive than meat ones, and the DALY impact of eating half a chicken doesn’t seem to be very different from favourable estimates of DALY impact of a dollar donation to Legal Impact for Chickens…
The other problem with the “indirect enough” argument is that the donations are even more indirect
Sure, the meat people eat is usually killed long before it’s ordered and eating a few dozen chickens per year doesn’t individually shift an industry. But likewise, a $1000 donation doesn’t meaningfully affect an advocacy charity’s ability to win a court case.
Both only work in aggregate, and on a causal basis the link between meat demand and factory farming is much more robustly-established than advocacy charity income and relative absence of factory farms[1]
This is a good point too. If you’re using donations to prioritise in a counterfactual scenario, what part of the outcome is actually “your impact” is irrelevant. If you’re using them to buy indulgences, that’s less obviously the case.
on a money basis it’s less certain, but I still don’t think vegan diets are dramatically more expensive than meat ones, and the DALY impact of eating half a chicken doesn’t seem to be very different from favourable estimates of DALY impact of a dollar donation to Legal Impact for Chickens…