Ethics Offsets to the Rescue

Farm animals seem to live in pretty miserable conditions.

I'm confused about whether to consider animals conscious in the way that humans are conscious (or in a way that I should care about). But in the interest of ethical caution, I'd prefer not to contribute to animal suffering.

I like eating meat, and am in general quite convenience-motivated, so I'd prefer not to go vegan or vegetarian.

So what to do?

My preferred solution is to purchase ethics offsets by donating to charities that work for the welfare of farm animals. If I donate enough, I can alleviate more suffering than I cause, and come out on net as an animal Champion and Protector.

I am not sure how much money it takes to alleviate as much suffering as eating meat causes, but I'd guess that $1 per day of meat consumption is more than enough.

I last donated to an animal welfare charity in August, 2015. So today I am making a donation of $1 per day since then in order to catch up and retain my (self-appointed) Champion and Protector status. I'm splitting my donation between Animal Charity Evaluators and Compassion in World Farming, as recommended by Lewis Bollard of the Open Philanthropy Project.

Also, I ate a hamburger today. It was delicious.

(Cross-posted from my blog.)

Comments

Kyle Bogosian

This is silly, if reducing animal suffering is a priority then you ought to do it rigorously; if it is not a priority then you ought to focus predominantly on something else.

Eric Rogstad

This is silly

Perhaps

then you ought to focus predominantly on something else

This does not seem inconsistent with the post. (Contributing $1 per day towards something hardly seems to preclude focusing predominantly on other things.) Do you disagree with that?

Kyle Bogosian

I disagree with the idea that donating exactly $1 per day to one kind of charity and making other donations to other charities is the best allocation of resources you can make for any reasonable value function. If there is a better cause out there, then it deserves that one dollar too.

Benjamin Hoffman

I think offsets are an excellent way to keep some cause-promoters honest. For instance, if people who care about animal welfare are tempted to exaggerate the effectiveness or evidence base for animal charities, they might be deterred by the thought that people will make the obvious inference about offsets, and conclude that it's not worth it to give up animal products because it's worth more to them than the price of the offset.

This works even if no one actually buys the offset - you can use this kind of number to help establish a preference ordering among very different uses of resources, like Katja Grace does here.

It's also worth just running the thought experiment as a check on your numbers - would you actually be happy if people gave $10 to CiWF instead of giving up chicken for a year? At what scale does this change?

Kyle Bogosian

I think offsets are an excellent way to keep some cause-promoters honest. For instance, if people who care about animal welfare are tempted to exaggerate the effectiveness or evidence base for animal charities, they might be deterred by the thought that people will make the obvious inference about offsets, and conclude that it's not worth it to give up animal products because it's worth more to them than the price of the offset.

It seems equally plausible that otherwise honest cause-promoters would be incentivized to be dishonest and downplay their cause effectiveness. In general, I don't think that assuming that everyone is a rational economic actor and speculating on their incentives to lie is very productive.

This works even if no one actually buys the offset - you can use this kind of number to help establish a preference ordering among very different uses of resources, like Katja Grace does here.

It's also worth just running the thought experiment as a check on your numbers - would you actually be happy if people gave $10 to CiWF instead of giving up chicken for a year? At what scale does this change?

Sure, that's fine, just not offsetting.