I’m not advocating offsetting, but I don’t have a good name for what I am trying to advocate. The idea is that you should prioritize the activities that have the best tradeoff between downside-for-you and upside-for-others. There are ways that this is similar to offsetting (if you can show that the harm caused by X is less than the harm caused by not donating $Y then you should feel fine donating $Y instead of avoiding X) but in this framework you don’t get to donating via tallying up your harms and pricing them, instead you set out to do as much good as you can without making yourself miserable.
Jeff has advocated this.
I’m not advocating offsetting, but I don’t have a good name for what I am trying to advocate. The idea is that you should prioritize the activities that have the best tradeoff between downside-for-you and upside-for-others. There are ways that this is similar to offsetting (if you can show that the harm caused by X is less than the harm caused by not donating $Y then you should feel fine donating $Y instead of avoiding X) but in this framework you don’t get to donating via tallying up your harms and pricing them, instead you set out to do as much good as you can without making yourself miserable.