I appreciate this proposal for large-scale “vegan offsetting”! I agree that it’s important that the rest of the world, full of people who aren’t going to change their diets overnight, find ways to help with reducing animal suffering.
That being said, I’m not sure if moral offsetting checks out theoretically, and there are some unique complications with the vegan case that come up in the comments on this post. I also don’t think the idea is intuitive outside of a subset of consequentialist and mathematically-inclined people, since most of the public probably isn’t okay with offsetting something like murder or domestic animal abuse.
If we’re really trying to get the vast majority of the world — people who like meat and hate torture — on board, I think a stronger solution might be helping meat eaters advocate for legislation or corporate action to improve farm conditions, or maybe even replace some of their consumption with alternatives like higher-welfare animal products or compelling alt proteins like Beyond. These might be preferable because, unlike offsetting, they make sense from a variety of moral perspectives and also make individual change feel achievable (which is important because the theories of change for the most effective animal charities do rely on people changing the products they eat eventually).
I’m particularly interested in demand offsetting for factory farming. I think this form of offsetting makes about as much sense as directly purchasing higher-welfare animal products.
Interesting — if you’d ever be interested in expanding on your post, I’d be curious to hear your response to the objections I bring up, or that are mentioned in the comments here.
The idea is: if I eat an egg and buy a certificate, I don’t increase demand for factory farmed eggs, and if I buy 2 certificates per egg I actually decrease demand. So I’m not offsetting and causing harm to hens, I’m directly decreasing the amount of harm to hens. I think this is OK according to most moral perspectives, though people might find it uncompelling. (Not sure which particular objections you have in mind.)
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).
It’s not one or the other- in fact I think an offsetting campaign would be complementary to political action because it would further awareness of the hell of factory farming. Indeed, some of the effective charities in the farmed animal welfare portfolio might be very promising legislative advocacy campaigns.
I think offsetting could appeal to more people than you think. People don’t like being complicit in torture and offsetting offers them the chance not to be. Of course, there’s no way of knowing until we actually make it easier for people to do.
I just wish these “other moral perspectives” would stop impeding the betterment of welfare of conscious beings...
The animal welfare movement (if my understanding is correct) has barely been able to move the needle on veganism over the decades it has been revealing its horrors. If we can identify effective charities that can help us toward systemic change in the farmed animal welfare space, maybe we should gain mass buy
-in for creating a world with a default of consumption without torture. We need to make available an ask that could be just as, or more effective, but easier for a lot of people: fund effective farmed animal welfare charities and be part of the solution-we can help you do it in 10 minutes.
Hmm, that’s interesting — I would be curious to see how many people offsetting appeals to in the broader public. This actually comes up in a SSC post, where he draws out the weird optics pretty well.
And I agree it’s not one or the other — in fact, I think the Askell piece brings that up as a point against offsetting. If we’re pursuing both, it might not be as useful to think of it as offsetting some inaction or moral wrong, but rather giving money plain and simple (in addition to other personal changes you’re making).
The animal welfare movement (if my understanding is correct) has barely been able to move the needle on veganism over the decades it has been revealing its horrors.
I might push back on this — in fact, I think the reason that it remains a major EA cause area is because there’s clear evidence of tractability. I suppose the significance of change could be debated, but 30 years ago, people barely knew what vegans were, and today there’s been a massive rise in awareness + acceptance + self-identification with the movement (though changes in consumption habits are a more complicated question) and just in the last 10 there’s been a ton of momentum improving things for animals and making veganism an easier ask (banning of battery cages in the EU, corporate cage-free campaigns pushing US cage-free from 5% to 35% in less than a decade, cultivated meat coming into existence and having the potential to scale, etc.)
We need to make available an ask that could be just as, or more effective, but easier for a lot of people: fund effective farmed animal welfare charities and be part of the solution-we can help you do it in 10 minutes.
FWIW, this ask is already out there (EA Funds and Animal Charity Evaluators both have pools you can contribute to in 2 minutes, where experts will then direct the money in a more thorough way). They don’t suggest a single dollar amount as an “offset,” probably for some of the reasons mentioned above, but everything else is there for people who do want to contribute financially rather than with their own dietary choices.
Yeah. I would too… But I think people feel more compelled to not do bad things than to positively do good things.
Maybe I’m wrong about veganism: my impression was that the rate of veganism has stayed relatively constant and farmed animal welfare charities have orders of magnitude less funding than global health and development. I think there’s definitely been progress in farmed animal welfare, but not necessarily in getting broader public buy in.
It all comes down to whether or not the public would be motivated by the offset framing. I know the framing was compelling to me when I was donating to Givewell charities (now I donate all my money to my own nonprofit). I figured I should at least donate enough to compensate for my own contribution to animal torture, and maybe some multiple of that… I figured there would be an easy way to do this online, but there wasn’t really an easy button.
Anyway, I think the search costs are well worth the possibility that offset-framing might be worth exploring… But they won’t be borne by me. I’m off trying to save the world by enabling consumers discrimination in favor of effective charities (buy the same shit for the same cost, but Against Malaria Foundation gets the profit rather than traditional shareholders).
Yeah the question about progress in the vegan movement is complicated and as you point out, there is a big difference between animal welfare improvements and the public actually going vegan.
For the raw stats of whether or not people identified as veg*n are consuming less meat, the best review I’ve read isn’t super optimistic, but I do think that awarness of veganism is increasing, the plant-based food industry is scaling super quickly, and better alternatives will hopefully make dietary shift more accessible to people. So especially when you compare where we are today to something like where we are 30+ years ago, I do think the progress is there, which is especially promising given that funding is lower as you mentioned.
But if a fundraising strategy like this could prove effective, I would be on board pretty easily. My only end goal is the world getting better, whether it’s because of choices individuals make or the choices the charities they help fund make. I’m still a bit pessimistic about the prospects, but fingers crossed that there is something here if someone does look into it.
I appreciate this proposal for large-scale “vegan offsetting”! I agree that it’s important that the rest of the world, full of people who aren’t going to change their diets overnight, find ways to help with reducing animal suffering.
That being said, I’m not sure if moral offsetting checks out theoretically, and there are some unique complications with the vegan case that come up in the comments on this post. I also don’t think the idea is intuitive outside of a subset of consequentialist and mathematically-inclined people, since most of the public probably isn’t okay with offsetting something like murder or domestic animal abuse.
If we’re really trying to get the vast majority of the world — people who like meat and hate torture — on board, I think a stronger solution might be helping meat eaters advocate for legislation or corporate action to improve farm conditions, or maybe even replace some of their consumption with alternatives like higher-welfare animal products or compelling alt proteins like Beyond. These might be preferable because, unlike offsetting, they make sense from a variety of moral perspectives and also make individual change feel achievable (which is important because the theories of change for the most effective animal charities do rely on people changing the products they eat eventually).
I’m particularly interested in demand offsetting for factory farming. I think this form of offsetting makes about as much sense as directly purchasing higher-welfare animal products.
Interesting — if you’d ever be interested in expanding on your post, I’d be curious to hear your response to the objections I bring up, or that are mentioned in the comments here.
The idea is: if I eat an egg and buy a certificate, I don’t increase demand for factory farmed eggs, and if I buy 2 certificates per egg I actually decrease demand. So I’m not offsetting and causing harm to hens, I’m directly decreasing the amount of harm to hens. I think this is OK according to most moral perspectives, though people might find it uncompelling. (Not sure which particular objections you have in mind.)
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).
It’s not one or the other- in fact I think an offsetting campaign would be complementary to political action because it would further awareness of the hell of factory farming. Indeed, some of the effective charities in the farmed animal welfare portfolio might be very promising legislative advocacy campaigns.
I think offsetting could appeal to more people than you think. People don’t like being complicit in torture and offsetting offers them the chance not to be. Of course, there’s no way of knowing until we actually make it easier for people to do.
I just wish these “other moral perspectives” would stop impeding the betterment of welfare of conscious beings...
The animal welfare movement (if my understanding is correct) has barely been able to move the needle on veganism over the decades it has been revealing its horrors. If we can identify effective charities that can help us toward systemic change in the farmed animal welfare space, maybe we should gain mass buy -in for creating a world with a default of consumption without torture. We need to make available an ask that could be just as, or more effective, but easier for a lot of people: fund effective farmed animal welfare charities and be part of the solution-we can help you do it in 10 minutes.
Hmm, that’s interesting — I would be curious to see how many people offsetting appeals to in the broader public. This actually comes up in a SSC post, where he draws out the weird optics pretty well.
And I agree it’s not one or the other — in fact, I think the Askell piece brings that up as a point against offsetting. If we’re pursuing both, it might not be as useful to think of it as offsetting some inaction or moral wrong, but rather giving money plain and simple (in addition to other personal changes you’re making).
I might push back on this — in fact, I think the reason that it remains a major EA cause area is because there’s clear evidence of tractability. I suppose the significance of change could be debated, but 30 years ago, people barely knew what vegans were, and today there’s been a massive rise in awareness + acceptance + self-identification with the movement (though changes in consumption habits are a more complicated question) and just in the last 10 there’s been a ton of momentum improving things for animals and making veganism an easier ask (banning of battery cages in the EU, corporate cage-free campaigns pushing US cage-free from 5% to 35% in less than a decade, cultivated meat coming into existence and having the potential to scale, etc.)
FWIW, this ask is already out there (EA Funds and Animal Charity Evaluators both have pools you can contribute to in 2 minutes, where experts will then direct the money in a more thorough way). They don’t suggest a single dollar amount as an “offset,” probably for some of the reasons mentioned above, but everything else is there for people who do want to contribute financially rather than with their own dietary choices.
Yeah. I would too… But I think people feel more compelled to not do bad things than to positively do good things.
Maybe I’m wrong about veganism: my impression was that the rate of veganism has stayed relatively constant and farmed animal welfare charities have orders of magnitude less funding than global health and development. I think there’s definitely been progress in farmed animal welfare, but not necessarily in getting broader public buy in.
It all comes down to whether or not the public would be motivated by the offset framing. I know the framing was compelling to me when I was donating to Givewell charities (now I donate all my money to my own nonprofit). I figured I should at least donate enough to compensate for my own contribution to animal torture, and maybe some multiple of that… I figured there would be an easy way to do this online, but there wasn’t really an easy button.
Anyway, I think the search costs are well worth the possibility that offset-framing might be worth exploring… But they won’t be borne by me. I’m off trying to save the world by enabling consumers discrimination in favor of effective charities (buy the same shit for the same cost, but Against Malaria Foundation gets the profit rather than traditional shareholders).
Yeah the question about progress in the vegan movement is complicated and as you point out, there is a big difference between animal welfare improvements and the public actually going vegan.
For the raw stats of whether or not people identified as veg*n are consuming less meat, the best review I’ve read isn’t super optimistic, but I do think that awarness of veganism is increasing, the plant-based food industry is scaling super quickly, and better alternatives will hopefully make dietary shift more accessible to people. So especially when you compare where we are today to something like where we are 30+ years ago, I do think the progress is there, which is especially promising given that funding is lower as you mentioned.
But if a fundraising strategy like this could prove effective, I would be on board pretty easily. My only end goal is the world getting better, whether it’s because of choices individuals make or the choices the charities they help fund make. I’m still a bit pessimistic about the prospects, but fingers crossed that there is something here if someone does look into it.