“And as Scott Alexander points out, offsetting could lead people to think it’s acceptable to do big harmful things as long as they offset them.”
I think it would be helpful to distinguish between the claims (1) “given that one has imposed some harm, one is obligated to offset it” and (2) “any imposition of harm is justified if it is offset.” This article argues against the first claim, while Scott argues that the second one seems false. It seems pretty easy to imagine someone accepting (1) and rejecting (2), and I’d be pretty skeptical of a causal connection between promoting (1) and more people believing in (2). The reverse seems just as (un)likely: “hey, if I don’t have to offset my harms, maybe causing harm doesn’t really matter to begin with.”
I don’t think the causal link between (1) and (2) is weak at all, but agree that the reverse is also likely, which is why I mentioned it: “the argument that we should focus on doing lots of good rather than fixing harms we cause could drive destructive thoughtlessness about personal behavior, so I’m wary about making it too frequently.”
Scott discusses claim (2) in his section III (below)
“The second troublesome case is a little more gruesome.
Current estimates suggest that $3340 worth of donations to global health causes saves, on average, one life.
Let us be excruciatingly cautious and include a two-order-of-magnitude margin of error. At $334,000, we are super duper sure we are saving at least one life.
So. Say I’m a millionaire with a spare $334,000, and there’s a guy I really don’t like…
Okay, fine. Get the irrelevant objections out of the way first and establish the least convenient possible world. I’m a criminal mastermind, it’ll be the perfect crime, and there’s zero chance I’ll go to jail. I can make it look completely natural, like a heart attack or something, so I’m not going to terrorize the city or waste police time and resources. The guy’s not supporting a family and doesn’t have any friends who will be heartbroken at his death. There’s no political aspect to my grudge, so this isn’t going to silence the enemies of the rich or anything like that. I myself have a terminal disease, and so the damage that I inflict upon my own soul with the act – or however it is Leah always phrases it – will perish with me immediately afterwards. There is no God, or if there is one He respects ethics offsets when you get to the Pearly Gates.
Or you know what? Don’t get the irrelevant objections out of the way. We can offset those too. The police will waste a lot of time investigating the murder? Maybe I’m very rich and I can make a big anonymous donation to the local police force that will more than compensate them for their trouble and allow them to hire extra officers to take up the slack. The local citizens will be scared there’s a killer on the loose? They’ll forget all about it once they learn taxes have been cut to zero percent thanks to an anonymous donation to the city government from a local tycoon.
Even what seems to me the most desperate and problematic objection – that maybe the malarial Africans saved by global health charities have lives that are in some qualitative way just not as valuable as those of happy First World citizens contributing to the global economy – can be fixed. If I’ve got enough money, a few hundred thousand to a million ought to be able to save the life of a local person in no way distinguishable from my victim. Heck, since this is a hypothetical problem and I have infinite money, why not save ten local people?
The best I can do here is to say that I am crossing a Schelling fence which might also be crossed by people who will be less scrupulous in making sure their offsets are in order. But perhaps I could offset that too. Also, we could assume I will never tell anybody. Also, anyone can just go murder someone right now without offsetting, so we’re not exactly talking about a big temptation for the unscrupulous.” (http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/04/ethics-offsets/)
I agree with this, and have written similarly here:
There is more that can be said. An objector could turn the screw by offering caveats to the thought experiment (or just sufficient offset) that the harm of killing is genuinely outweighed by the benefits – yet, they insist, doing so would still be wrong...
I think consequentialists should ultimately yield – these are costs to the theory, and the best that can be hoped for is to ameliorate these (one could appeal to saying ones intuitions in a sufficiently caveated case are unreliable may be one approach). It would be remarkable if a moral theory on reflection accorded with all of our moral intuitions all the time. Instead of defending the difficultly defensible, it is perhaps better to appeal that the balance of benefits of costs of consequentialism does better than other theories, notwithstanding its poor performance in these particular cases
“And as Scott Alexander points out, offsetting could lead people to think it’s acceptable to do big harmful things as long as they offset them.”
I think it would be helpful to distinguish between the claims (1) “given that one has imposed some harm, one is obligated to offset it” and (2) “any imposition of harm is justified if it is offset.” This article argues against the first claim, while Scott argues that the second one seems false. It seems pretty easy to imagine someone accepting (1) and rejecting (2), and I’d be pretty skeptical of a causal connection between promoting (1) and more people believing in (2). The reverse seems just as (un)likely: “hey, if I don’t have to offset my harms, maybe causing harm doesn’t really matter to begin with.”
I don’t think the causal link between (1) and (2) is weak at all, but agree that the reverse is also likely, which is why I mentioned it: “the argument that we should focus on doing lots of good rather than fixing harms we cause could drive destructive thoughtlessness about personal behavior, so I’m wary about making it too frequently.”
Scott discusses claim (2) in his section III (below)
“The second troublesome case is a little more gruesome.
Current estimates suggest that $3340 worth of donations to global health causes saves, on average, one life.
Let us be excruciatingly cautious and include a two-order-of-magnitude margin of error. At $334,000, we are super duper sure we are saving at least one life.
So. Say I’m a millionaire with a spare $334,000, and there’s a guy I really don’t like…
Okay, fine. Get the irrelevant objections out of the way first and establish the least convenient possible world. I’m a criminal mastermind, it’ll be the perfect crime, and there’s zero chance I’ll go to jail. I can make it look completely natural, like a heart attack or something, so I’m not going to terrorize the city or waste police time and resources. The guy’s not supporting a family and doesn’t have any friends who will be heartbroken at his death. There’s no political aspect to my grudge, so this isn’t going to silence the enemies of the rich or anything like that. I myself have a terminal disease, and so the damage that I inflict upon my own soul with the act – or however it is Leah always phrases it – will perish with me immediately afterwards. There is no God, or if there is one He respects ethics offsets when you get to the Pearly Gates.
Or you know what? Don’t get the irrelevant objections out of the way. We can offset those too. The police will waste a lot of time investigating the murder? Maybe I’m very rich and I can make a big anonymous donation to the local police force that will more than compensate them for their trouble and allow them to hire extra officers to take up the slack. The local citizens will be scared there’s a killer on the loose? They’ll forget all about it once they learn taxes have been cut to zero percent thanks to an anonymous donation to the city government from a local tycoon.
Even what seems to me the most desperate and problematic objection – that maybe the malarial Africans saved by global health charities have lives that are in some qualitative way just not as valuable as those of happy First World citizens contributing to the global economy – can be fixed. If I’ve got enough money, a few hundred thousand to a million ought to be able to save the life of a local person in no way distinguishable from my victim. Heck, since this is a hypothetical problem and I have infinite money, why not save ten local people?
The best I can do here is to say that I am crossing a Schelling fence which might also be crossed by people who will be less scrupulous in making sure their offsets are in order. But perhaps I could offset that too. Also, we could assume I will never tell anybody. Also, anyone can just go murder someone right now without offsetting, so we’re not exactly talking about a big temptation for the unscrupulous.” (http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/04/ethics-offsets/)
I agree with this, and have written similarly here: