Right! I appreciated reading your post about this.
I think the objection that I find is most relevant is that moral offsetting only seems intuitive to a subset of consequentalist-leaning people (who may be overrepresented on this forum), but strikes many as morally abhorrent, at least for harming living creatures. I guess carbon offsetting is more popular, but I don’t think an offset for beating your dog would be widely admired, so I’m not sure what people would make of an offset about the treatment of farmed animals. But I think people thinking caged eggs are wrong but then offsetting them so they can keep eating them might not be seen with any moral credibility by the wider public.
I also think the other objections raised in the forum post are interesting — that it might be psychologically complicated to both eat animals raised under poor conditions and still aim to better their lot, and that the signaling effects of being vegan (or abstaining from particularly bad animal products, in your case) are probably underrated.
I don’t think those objections to offsetting really apply to demand offsetting. If I paid someone for a high-welfare egg, I shouldn’t think about my action as bringing an unhappy hen into existence and then “offsetting” that by making it better off. And that would be true even if I paid someone for a high-welfare egg, but then swapped my egg with someone else’s normal egg. And by the same token if I pay someone to sell a high-welfare egg on the market labeled as a normal egg, and then buy a normal egg from the market, I haven’t increased the net demand for normal eggs at all and so am not causally responsible for any additional factory-farmed hens.
I agree on this — what you bring up is more about the immediate logic of demand offsetting, and less about the optics or longer-term implications of demand offsetting. My first objection was that this doesn’t scale well to the broader public as OP mentioned (because to them you are voluntarily purchasing and eating a product from an animal you think was mistreated, while also sparing a totally separate animal, or two). So I don’t think it avoids the bad optics that things like murder offsets would carry.
But it’s not that it doesn’t make a certain sense within the consequentialist framework (which I think it does, though I hesitate on account of the other objections I mentioned — how this would impact someone’s psychology long-term and the lack of some signaling effects in abstaining from low-welfare products).
Right! I appreciated reading your post about this.
I think the objection that I find is most relevant is that moral offsetting only seems intuitive to a subset of consequentalist-leaning people (who may be overrepresented on this forum), but strikes many as morally abhorrent, at least for harming living creatures. I guess carbon offsetting is more popular, but I don’t think an offset for beating your dog would be widely admired, so I’m not sure what people would make of an offset about the treatment of farmed animals. But I think people thinking caged eggs are wrong but then offsetting them so they can keep eating them might not be seen with any moral credibility by the wider public.
I also think the other objections raised in the forum post are interesting — that it might be psychologically complicated to both eat animals raised under poor conditions and still aim to better their lot, and that the signaling effects of being vegan (or abstaining from particularly bad animal products, in your case) are probably underrated.
I don’t think those objections to offsetting really apply to demand offsetting. If I paid someone for a high-welfare egg, I shouldn’t think about my action as bringing an unhappy hen into existence and then “offsetting” that by making it better off. And that would be true even if I paid someone for a high-welfare egg, but then swapped my egg with someone else’s normal egg. And by the same token if I pay someone to sell a high-welfare egg on the market labeled as a normal egg, and then buy a normal egg from the market, I haven’t increased the net demand for normal eggs at all and so am not causally responsible for any additional factory-farmed hens.
I agree on this — what you bring up is more about the immediate logic of demand offsetting, and less about the optics or longer-term implications of demand offsetting. My first objection was that this doesn’t scale well to the broader public as OP mentioned (because to them you are voluntarily purchasing and eating a product from an animal you think was mistreated, while also sparing a totally separate animal, or two). So I don’t think it avoids the bad optics that things like murder offsets would carry.
But it’s not that it doesn’t make a certain sense within the consequentialist framework (which I think it does, though I hesitate on account of the other objections I mentioned — how this would impact someone’s psychology long-term and the lack of some signaling effects in abstaining from low-welfare products).