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).
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).