Interesting article—thanks for sharing. My main problem with it has to do with the moral psychology piece. You write that:
It’s “disgusting and counterintuitive” for most people to imagine offsetting murder.
and
“Most of us still live in extremely carnist cultures and are bombarded with burger ads and sights of people enjoying meat next to us all the time like it is perfectly harmless.”
In my opinion, these two arguments together make meat offsets a bad idea. People are opposed to murder offsets (no matter how theoretically effectively they may be) because murder feels like a deeply immoral thing to do. However, most people feel that eating meat is not deeply immoral—most people do it every day. I’d imagine folks react the same way to meat offsets as they do to carbon offsets. They think, “well I know I probably shouldn’t eat so much meat / consume so much carbon, but I’m not gonna stop, so this offset makes some sense”. But this is the wrong way to think about eating meat (and perhaps consuming carbon, too, but that’s beside the point). We want people to feel that eating meat is immoral; we want them to feel that it’s a form of killing a sentient being. And the availability of an offset trivializes the consumption.
I’m on board with your consequentialist reasoning here, but I’m worried the availability meat offsets may cause people’s moral opinion on animal ethics to regress.
Interesting article—thanks for sharing. My main problem with it has to do with the moral psychology piece. You write that:
It’s “disgusting and counterintuitive” for most people to imagine offsetting murder.
and
“Most of us still live in extremely carnist cultures and are bombarded with burger ads and sights of people enjoying meat next to us all the time like it is perfectly harmless.”
In my opinion, these two arguments together make meat offsets a bad idea. People are opposed to murder offsets (no matter how theoretically effectively they may be) because murder feels like a deeply immoral thing to do. However, most people feel that eating meat is not deeply immoral—most people do it every day. I’d imagine folks react the same way to meat offsets as they do to carbon offsets. They think, “well I know I probably shouldn’t eat so much meat / consume so much carbon, but I’m not gonna stop, so this offset makes some sense”. But this is the wrong way to think about eating meat (and perhaps consuming carbon, too, but that’s beside the point). We want people to feel that eating meat is immoral; we want them to feel that it’s a form of killing a sentient being. And the availability of an offset trivializes the consumption.
I’m on board with your consequentialist reasoning here, but I’m worried the availability meat offsets may cause people’s moral opinion on animal ethics to regress.