[My views are my own, not my employer's. Thanks to Michael Dickens for reviewing this post prior to publication.]
[More discussion here]
Summary
Spreading ethical offsetting is antithetical to EA values because it encourages people to focus on negating harm they personally cause rather than doing as much good as possible. Also, the most favored reference class for the offsets is rather vague and arbitrary.
There are a few positive aspects of using ethical offsets, and situations in which advocating ethical offsets may be effective.
Definition
Ethical offsetting is the practice of undoing harms caused by one's activities through donations or other acts of altruism. Examples of ethical offsetting include purchasing carbon offsets to make up for one’s carbon emissions and donating to animal charities to offset animal product consumption. More explanation and examples are available in this article.
Against offsetting
I think ethical offsetting is antithetical to EA values, and have three main objections to it.
1) In practice, people doing ethical offsetting use vague and arbitrary reference classes.
2) It's not the most effectively altruistic thing to do.
3) It spreads suboptimal and non-consequentialist memes/norms about doing good.
1) The reference class people pick for ethical offsets is arbitrary.
For example, let's say I cause some harm by buying milk that came from a cow that was treated poorly, and I want to negate the harm. I have a bunch of options.
I cannot undo the exact harm done by my purchase once it's happened, but I could (try to) seek out that specific cow and try to do something nice for her, negating the harm I caused for that specific cow's utility calculus. I could donate some money to a charity that helps cows, negating my harmful effect on the total utility of cow-kind. I could donate some money to a charity that helps all farmed animals, negating my harmful effect on farmed animal-kind. Or I could donate to whatever charity I thought did the most good per dollar, negating my negative impact on the universe most cost-effectively but less directly.
People seem to settle on a sort of broad cause-area-level offsetting preference (e.g. donating to help farmed animals). While reference class seems intuitive, it's ultimately arbitrary*.
2) Ethical offsetting isn't the most effectively altruistic thing.
You should do the things you think are most effectively altruistic, and you should donate to the charities you think are most effective. If you eat dead animals and don't believe animal charities are the most effective charities, I don't think you should donate to them.
Like everything else, ethical offsetting has opportunity costs; you could use that money to donate to the best charity, which is often different from the charity you’re using for ethical offsetting. It causes a harm relative to the world where you donate only to the most effective charity.
Even if you think the charity you donate your offsetting money to is the most effective, I don’t think it’s helpful to do ethical offsetting. Much of the suffering in the world isn’t directly caused by anyone, so an offsetting mindset increases the probability that you’ll miss big sources of suffering down the line. It causes a bias towards addressing anthropogenic harms, rather than harms from nature.
3) Ethical offsetting spreads anti-EA memes and norms
Ethical offsetting reinforces a preoccupation with not doing harmful things (instead of not allowing harmful things to happen, and taking action when they do). But EAs should (and usually do) focus on the sufferers, not themselves.
By encouraging others to offset, we set norms oriented around people’s personal behavior. We encourage an inefficient model of charity that involves donating based on one’s activities, not one’s abilities or the needs of charities that help neutralize various harms. We miss the chance to communicate about core EA ideas like cause prioritization and room for more funding by establishing a framework that has little room for them.
There are some other dangers involved in ethical offsetting, although I haven’t seen much evidence they actually occur: Offsetting may also encourage unhealthy scrupulosity about the harms we inevitably contribute to in order to function (although it could also help alleviate anxiety about them). And as Scott Alexander points out, offsetting could lead people to think it’s acceptable to do big harmful things as long as they offset them. This could contribute to careless and destructive norms about personal behavior.
Caveats
Offsetting is better than nothing. There may be situations in which ethical offsetting is the biggest plausible ask one can make. In such situations, I think bringing up the idea of ethical offsetting may be appropriate. And it may be an interesting conversation starter about sources of suffering and ways of alleviating them.
I've previously discussed my concerns about the obstacles to changing one's mind about cause prioritization, and I can imagine ethical offsetting at the cause area level being used to remind oneself about various causes of suffering in the world and the organizations working to stop them. This could make it easier to change one’s mind about what’s most effective. It seems somewhat plausible that offsetting would help make the community better at updating and better informed.
It may be really psychologically beneficial for some people, similar to the way donations for the dubiously-named fuzzies (donations for causes that are especially personally meaningful to the donor rather than maximally effective) sometimes are.
I think the argument that we should focus on doing lots of good rather than fixing harms we cause could drive destructive thoughtlessness about personal behavior, so I’m wary about making it too frequently. I’m most worried about this concern.
*The reference class schelling point is stronger with carbon offsets, where the harmful thing is adding some carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide molecules are pretty interchangeable. If you remove as many as you added, you neutralize the harm from your emissions-causing action very directly, which is intuitively appealing.
All suffering may be equally important, but not all forms of harm are the same, or even similar. How similar the harm you offset is to the harm you cause can vary a lot. Few other types of offsetting I’ve heard of allow the opportunity to create a future so similar to the one where the harmful activity had never been done.
I don't think ethical offsetting is antithetical to EA. I think it's orthogonal to EA.
We face questions in our lives of whether we should do things that harm others. Two examples are taking a long plane flight (which may take us somewhere we really want to go, but also release a lot of carbon and cause global warming) or whether we should eat meat (which might taste good but also contribute to animal suffering). EA and the principles of EA don't give us a good guide on whether we should do these things or not. Yes, the EA ethos is to do good, but there's also an understanding that none of us are perfect. A friend of a friend used to take cold showers, because the energy that would have heated her shower would be made by a polluted coal plant. I think that's taking ethical behavior in your personal life too far. But I also think that it's possible to take ethical behavior in your personal life not far enough, and counterproductively shrug it off with "Well, I'm an EA, who cares?" But nobody knows exactly how far is too far vs. not far enough, and EA doesn't help us figure that out.
Ethical offsetting is a way of helping figure this out. It can be either a metaphorical way, eg "I just realized that it would only take 0.01 cents to offset the damage from this shower, so forget about it", or a literal way "I am actually going to pay 0.01 cents to offset the costs of this shower."
As such, I think all of your objections to offsetting fall short:
The reference class doesn't particularly matter. The point is that you worried you were doing vast harm to the world by taking a hot shower, but in fact you're only doing 0.01 cents of harm to the world. You can pay that back to whoever it most soothes your conscience to pay it back to.
Nobody is a perfectly effective altruist who donates 100% of their money to charity. If you choose to donate 10% of your money to charity, that remaining 90% is yours to do whatever you want with. If what you want is to offset your actions, you have just as much right to do that as you have to spend it on booze and hookers.
Ethical offsetting isn't an "anti-EA meme" any more than "be vegetarian" or "tip the waiter" are "anti-EA memes". Both involve having some sort of moral code other than buying bednets, but EA isn't about limiting your morality to buying bednets, it's about that being a bare minimum. Once you've done that, you can consider what other moral interests you might have.
People who become vegetarian believe that, along with their charitable donations, they feel morally pushed to being vegetarian. That's okay. People who want to offset meat-eating believe that, along with their charitable donations, they feel morally pushed to offset not being vegetarian. That's also okay. As long as they're not taking it out of the money they've pledged to effective charity, it's not EA's business whether they want to do that or not, just as it's not EA's business whether they become vegetarian or tip the waiter or behave respectfully to their parents or refuse to take hot showers. Other forms of morality aren't in competition with EA and don't subvert EA. If anything they contribute to the general desire to build a more moral world.
Your reply seems to be based on the premise that EA is some sort of a deontological duty to donate 10% of your income towards buying bednets. My interpretation of EA is very different. My perspective is that EA is about investing significant effort into optimizing the positive impact of your life on the world at large, roughly in the same sense that a startup founder invests significant effort into optimizing the future worth of their company (at least if they are a founder that stands a chance).
The deviation from imaginary “perfect altruisim” is either du... (read more)