Moral offsetting

Can money cancel out meat consumption?

Imagine there’s a non-profit that claims to offset the meat, dairy, and eggs consumption of one average omnivore for X dollars per month. In other words, the amount of suffering that they manage to prevent with those X dollars every month is exactly the same as the amount of suffering that you would prevent if you went vegan. Now imagine two average omnivores just watched some documentary about animal cruelty and decided to do something about it. One of them decided to go vegan, and the other decided to offset their consumption of animal products. Are their decisions morally equivalent? Or is one decision better than the other?

From a strictly consequentialist perspective, their decisions are perfectly equivalent. Many vegans, however, feel uncomfortable about the idea of offsetting one’s consumption of animal products. If this is permissible, they argue, people might as well rape and then offset the harm by donating to some NGO that helps rape victims, organizes educational programs to prevent rape, etc. But does this argument really stand?

As sincere as this argument may be, it is a type of appeal to emotion. If “reductio ad Hitlerum” attempts to invalidate somebody’s position on the basis of it being somehow linkable to Hitler, today a perhaps even more common strategy is “reductio ad stuprum”, in…