If we’re going to promote offsetting, I reckon these kinds of considerations will not be interesting to the vast majority of the target audience, and they wouldn’t expect to have them explained. Just do the maths, taking into account positives avoided as well as negatives caused, and tell people how much they need to donate to offset those impacts of their non-veganism.
(I say this as someone who is pretty sceptical of offsetting non-veganism, for both moral/deontologically-flavoured reasons and strategic/consequentialist ones.)
It might make sense to have the ability to toggle a “harm negation” and a “total counterfactual expected difference” calculation. But you’re right that a lot of people who offsetting might appeal to may not want to investigate these distinctions.
Nice, got it.
If we’re going to promote offsetting, I reckon these kinds of considerations will not be interesting to the vast majority of the target audience, and they wouldn’t expect to have them explained. Just do the maths, taking into account positives avoided as well as negatives caused, and tell people how much they need to donate to offset those impacts of their non-veganism.
(I say this as someone who is pretty sceptical of offsetting non-veganism, for both moral/deontologically-flavoured reasons and strategic/consequentialist ones.)
It might make sense to have the ability to toggle a “harm negation” and a “total counterfactual expected difference” calculation. But you’re right that a lot of people who offsetting might appeal to may not want to investigate these distinctions.