Ethical offsetting is antithetical to EA

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

This is a bit of a side point, but to what extent do EAs actually promote ethical offsetting? It seems to me like it normally gets raised in the following ways:

1. A dominance argument to show that ethical consumption isn't the most important thing to focus on. Hypothetical example: If I think AMF is the best donation opportunity, but donating to The Humane League is better than going vegetarian (because it would be very cheap to "offset" my diet), it shows that donations to AMF are very much better than going vegetarian. This shows going vegetarian makes a small contribution to my potential social impact, so I shouldn't do it unless it involves negligible sacrifice.

2. As an option for non-consequentialist minded people who don't just want to focus on the best activities, because they have special obligations to avoid doing certain types of harm.

It doesn't seem like EAs promote ethical offsetting as a generally good thing to do. Rather, EAs suggest identifying the highest leverage ways for you to make a difference in the world, and focusing your attention on those. (and not worrying about other ways to have more impact that involve more sacrifice)

I just discovered this related and entertaining passage from Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist (2005).

Here I am, going to a panel discussion organized by an environmental charity, and a very earnest young member of staff is grilling me before I even get past the door of the lecture hall.

“How did you travel here today? We need to know for our carbon offset program.”

“What’s a carbon offset program?”

“We want all our meetings to be carbon-neutral. We ask everyone who attends to let us know how far they came and on what mode of transportation, and then we work out how much carbon dioxide was emitted and plant trees to offset the emissions.”

The Undercover Economist is about to blow his cover.

“I see. In that case, I came here in an anthracite powered steamer from Australia.”

“Sorry . . . how do you spell anthracite?”

“It’s just a kind of coal—very dirty, lots of sulfur. OW!”

The Undercover Economist’s wife gives him a sharp dig in the ribs.

“Ignore him. We both cycled here.”

“Oh.”

Apart from being a good example of how irritating an Undercover Economist can be, this true story should, I hope, provoke a few questions. Why would an environmental charity organize a carbon neutral meeting? The obvious answer is “so that it can engage in debate without contributing to climate change.” And that is true, but misleading.

The Undercover Economist in me was looking at things from the point of view of efficiency. If planting trees is a good way to deal with climate change, why not forget about the meetings and plant as many as possible? (In which case, everybody should say they came by steamship.) If the awareness-raising debate is the important thing, why not forget about the trees and organize extra debates?

In other words, why be “carbon-neutral” when you can be “carbon-optimal,” especially since the meeting was not benzene-neutral, lead-neutral, particulate-neutral, ozone-neutral, sulfur-neutral, congestion-neutral, noise-neutral, or accident-neutral? Instead of working out whether to improve the environment directly (by planting trees), or indirectly (by promoting discussion), the charity was spending considerable energy keeping itself precisely “neutral”—and not even precisely neutral on all externalities, nor even a modest range of environmental toxins, but preserving its neutrality on a single, high-profile pollutant: carbon dioxide. And it was doing so in a very public way.

One thing I like about offsetting is that it creates a more cooperative and inclusive EA community. I.e., animal advocates might be put off less by meat-eating EAs if they learn they offset their consumption, or poverty reducers might be less concerned about long-termists making policy recommendations that (perhaps as a side effect) slow down AI progress (and thereby the escape from global poverty) if they also support some poverty interventions (especially when doing so is particularly cheap for them). In general, there seem to be significant gains from cooperation, and given repeated interaction, it's fairly easy to actually move towards such outcomes, including by starting to cooperate unilaterally.

Of course, this is best achieved not through offsetting, but by thinking about who we will want to cooperate with and trying to help their values as cost-effectively as possible.

I sympathise with the point you make with this post.

However, isn't it antithetical to consequentialism, rather than EA? EAs can have prohibitions against causing harms to groups of people.

How does this speak to people who use rule-based ethics that obliges them to investigate the benefit of their charitable gifts?

I strongly agree.  It's like trying to avoid a trade deficit with every country you interact with. The currency of value is better if it's not region-locked.

Often EAs propose offsetting as a counterargument to "if something harms others you must not do it". So you show that offsetting is better than strict harm avoidance, and then you give reasons why you should instead focus on the most important things.

Offsetting isn't antithetical to EA; to my mind it's a step towards EA.

Notice that the narrowest possible offset is avoiding an action. This perfectly undoes the harm one would have done by taking the action. Every time I stop myself from doing harm I can think of myself as buying an offset of the harm I would have done for the price it cost me to avoid it.

I think your arguments against offsetting apply to all actions. The conclusion would be to never avoid doing harm unless it's the cheapest way to help.

I am not aware of EA associated people using ethical offsets beyond a small amount they don't consider part of their charity budget. Is there an "Ethical Offsetting is Great for EA" position you are arguing against?

Thanks for this post.

It's like we came full circle from people donating minimal amounts of money to charity to relieve their guilt over their perpetuation of global injustice, to people working very hard and doing everything they can to fight global injustice, to people donating minimal amounts of money to relieve their guilt over their perpetuation of global injustice.

Just accept it. Some of your actions will harm others no matter what you do. The only way to make it worthwhile is to go out there and achieve lots of valuable things. Be confident and proud of what you accomplish and you can accept the harm that you will have to commit.

Thank you for this thought-provoking article! We want to make it the topic of our next meetup, so I’ve tried to clarify what my new position should be.

Your first two points are easily conceded—in my view everyone should direct their donations to the, in their view, most effective charity when offsetting. Your third point is most interesting.

Nino already married your and Scott’s positions, but I find it more useful to structure my thoughts in a list of pros and cons anyway.

On the pro side I see the following arguments:

1. Contrary to Claire’s point, I think offsetting also questions the act-omission distinction because instead of forgoing something, one engages in proactive activism. Having done that, it will be harder to later argue that doing good is supererogatory, because it would be inconsistent with one’s past behavior.
2. Offsetting can be used as a starting point to extend the circle of compassion in that a person could be brought to care enough about the harm inflicted by friends and family members to offset for them too. (But I haven’t seen this implemented.)
3. Charities that advocate for nonhuman animals are probably the most commonly chosen reference class, and they are highly funding constrained, possibly more than they are talent constrained, so that an additional regular donor may be worth many additional vegans.
4. Outside EA there are many nonveg*ns that are compassionate and want to reduce suffering but find that for them or in their context, veganism would be hard. Instead of resorting to the defensiveness and denigration discussed at the last meetup, they can join in with highly impactful donations.
5. Offsetting can counter the cliché that veg*ns are dogmatic Siths that only deal in absolutes.
6. Bridging the schism between veg*ns and nonveg*ns can help make advocacy for farmed animals a universally accepted movement, which would greatly simplify political advocacy.

On the con side I see the following arguments:

1. Offsetting also bolsters the act-omission distinction because it fails to provide incentives to scale one’s proactive activism beyond the low level of harm the average person inflicts, so that the offsetter will fall far short of their potential. (Unless they also offset for friends and family members or even larger circles.)
2. Offsetting may incur moral licensing when the satisfaction a person gains from “having donated” doesn’t scale in proportion with the size of the donation, so that a small donation makes further donations unlikely to the same extend that a large donation would have.
3. Advantage 3 only holds for our current state of an anti-inductive system. In a decade or two there will hopefully be a point when the suffering of farmed animals has been reduced sufficiently to make offsetting much more expensive. At that point, an additional veg*n will be more valuable than an additional offsetter given what the latter can be expected to be able to donate. In short, success in offsetting values spreading diminishes its own value. Core EA ideas don’t suffer from that problem.
4. Offsetting when described in terms of offsetting is only compatible with a subclass of consequentialist moralities, so that it’s impact is limited or the framing should be reconsidered.
5. Offsetting may signal a readiness to defect (in such situations as the prisoner’s dilemma or the stag hunt), which might interfere with the offsetter’s chances for trade with agents that are not value aligned.
6. Offsetting when described in terms of offsetting may in turn introduce (or aggravate) the schism between deontological and consequentialist veg*ns.
7. When offsetting funds are taken from a person’s EA budget, it is at best meaningless because the money would’ve been donated effectively anyway, and likely harmful if the reference class is chosen to exclude the most effective giving opportunities.
8. When offsetting becomes associated with EA, it may increase the perceived weirdness of EA, making it harder for people to associate with more important ideas of EA.

Some of the disadvantages only limit the scope of offsetting, others could be avoided with different rhetoric. What other pros or cons did I forget?

Edit: I've posted before reading others comments. Others have already made this an similar points.

Here is a story of how ethical offsetting can be effective.

I was trying to decide if I should fly or go by train. Flying is much faster and slightly cheaper, but train is much more environmentally friendly.  With out the option of environmental offset, I have no idea how to compare these values, i.e. [my time and money] v.s. [direct environmental effect of flying]. 

What I did was to calculate what offsetting would cost, and it turned out to be around one USD, so basically nothing. I could now conclude that:

Flying + offsetting > Going by train

Because I would save time, and I could easily afford to offset more than the harm I would do by flying, and still pay less in total.

Now, since I'm an EA I could also do the next step

Flying + donating to the most effective thing > Flying + offsetting > Going by train.

But I needed at least the idea of offsetting to simplify the calculation to something I could manage my self in an afternoon. In the first step I compare things that are similar enough so the comparison is mostly straight forward. The second step is actually super complicated, but it's the sort of thing EAs has been doing for year, so for this I can fall back on others. 

But I'm not sure how I would have done the direct comparison between [flying + donating] v.s. [going by train]. I'm sure it's doable some how, but with the middle step, it was so much much easier.

While I agree that offsetting isn't the best thing to spend resources on, I don't like the framing of it being 'antithetical to EA'. Whether offsetting is a good idea or not is a good, object-level discussion to have. Whether it is aligned with or antithetical to EA brings in a lot more connotations, with little to gain:

• People who liked offsetting since earlier might think that EA isn't for them.
• People who like the EA-community and do offset might worry whether this means that they aren't 'EA enough' (without even reading the arguments).
• People who are in favor of utilitarian reasoning but don't like the EA community might ignore the arguments.
• The comment section might be used to discuss the definition of EA, instead of whether offsetting is a good idea or not.

Offsetting can also be viewed as deciding to co-operating in a tragedy of the commons like situation. If a large enough proportion of the population/businesses decided to offset their emissions then presumably global warming would cease to be an issue. This would cost everyone a small amount individually, but the individual gain would be large. Perhaps the money could do more good elsewhere, but defecting simply encourages more people to defect as well and possibly causes the whole deal to collapse.

Not that I offset my carbon, just an interesting thought.

"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."

This has roughly been my reasoning for considering donating small sums to Animal suffering as a cause area and Climate Change as a cause area. (Though I haven't done so yet.) I think it helps people to keep an open mind and am therefore happy to see them offsetting their 'wrong' behaviour.

I agree with Ryan's and Linch's comments as well.

I'm not sure that offsetting is better than nothing - it may actually be harmful:

1. Offsetting fools people into thinking that their emissions from (eg) flying can be "made harmless" in some way, whereas the bald physical reality is that for flight emissions, they are the most dangerous emissions, in the most fragile part of the atmosphere (apart from ESAS methane release, and long term impact of HCFCs and HFCs).

2. It's harmful to help persuade people it's fine to pollute and pay, rather than actually reduce actual emissions, especially if most offsets don't genuinely lead to real and lasting net emissions reductions.

3. Offsetting is a way that corporations can make out that they and their customers are somehow not causing net harm ie. off-setting contributes to corporate greenwash, which is a form of lying.

"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."

I think it would be helpful to distinguish between the claims (1) "given that one has imposed some harm, one is obligated to offset it" and (2) "any imposition of harm is justified if it is offset." This article argues against the first claim, while Scott argues that the second one seems false. It seems pretty easy to imagine someone accepting (1) and rejecting (2), and I'd be pretty skeptical of a causal connection between promoting (1) and more people believing in (2). The reverse seems just as (un)likely: "hey, if I don't have to offset my harms, maybe causing harm doesn't really matter to begin with."

Good points, but I would go further, having worked in this field both with meteorologists and politicals.

Individual Offsets are easier than behaviour change to do, so a handy sop to guilty conscience of middle class people, who want to keep driving and flying, so perfect for self-deception.

More here: www.rationalreflection.net/can-we-offset-immorality

Thus offsets at individual and local level = advanced greenwash, wrapped up as an environmental project.

In fact, most offsets are deeply flawed and many, particularly renewable energy projects (which may help with health and education and have many other justifications) lead to INCREASED emissions - as they tend to lead to purchases of electrical goods, and so a huge increase in energy use locally and in the countries manufacturing the goods, even with reducing carbon intensity.

The best destinations for carbon funds probably include wetland protection in semi-arid regions (see my own www.theglobalcoolingproject.com) or climate campaign groups eg EIA for their HCFC work on the Montreal/Kigali protocols or anyone working on aircraft emissions or in India/China or on combating denialism or bridging political divides (eg George Marshall from Climate Outreach).