i saw this in a tweet or maybe a substack or sth once but can’t find it now. i feel like a calculator that you input type of meat and amount per week would be v useful.
tldr; Unilaterally inflicted pain, suffering, and/or death is not morally fungible like money, it is personal.
I feel that the concept underlying this question is strife with virtue signaling and perhaps some level of self deception.
A person purports to hold certain values but they have preferences that are contradictory to those values and because of that internal conflict, money is supposed to morally right the wrongs they precieve that they are doing. Like the money is a self inflicted punishment or the money is doing good to counter act the bad.
If the question is re-framed, i think it becomes apparent that, for most people, money cannot be a substitution for morality.
How much money does someone have to give to domestic violence charities to make it okay for them to continue to beat their partner? Okay from society's perspective or from their partner's perspective?
How much does someone have to prepay into their morality piggy bank to balance the morality scales to allow them to kill a random individual with their bare hands each time they top off their morality piggy bank with out going into a morality deficit? So that they can continue to feel good about themselves, or their victim will recognize that at least they are being killed by a good person.
If one genuinely feels that eating meat is immoral then I would have to agree with @100Anonymous.
If one is okay with eating meat but object to the conditions which industrial farms raise animals in, then they may wish to only eat meat from sources that match their morality code in how they treat the animals that they raise for meat or raise the meat themselves to have socratic knowledge of the conditions under which the animals were raise meet their morality code.
Donating money to improve the lives of some animals while taking zero personal action or responsibility to not participate in the cruelty of the animals you eat, treats cruelty, or the lack thereof, as a fungible commodity, because paying someone else to worry about it is eaiser than getting personally involved.
Dammit. I love eating meat. Now all this pontification demands that I examine the sources of meat available to me to find the path forward that is most consistent with my personal values or to take a hard look at what my personal values really are and not live in the personal delusion that ignorance permits.
@ShitakiIntaki Thanks for the thoughtful response! I do think this is a different case than me killing someone & donating elsewhere, though. Our society needs re-orienting around eating vegetarian, and just me abstaining from meat is not the most effective way of doing that. I can have outsize impact by donating money to organizations that lobby for new animal care standards, for example. This is different than the case of murdering people. Society isn't already oriented around murdering people, and I can't have outsize impact by donating to any one org. If I do go ahead and murder someone that's more of a me problem, not a societal one.
@ian homicide is admittedly hyperbolic. I feel like pain and suffering not being fungible, makes sense, but the utilitarian in me tells me that I am wrong.
Substitute "kicking a random dog" for "murder" and the argument is better aligned to the animal cruelty question. I would argue that taking care of animals doesn't make willfully hurting a single animal less distasteful, but if that action were balance against benefiting an arbitrary number of animals or an arbitrary amount of good or happiness then the utilitarian in me says it is tasteful.
Maybe the big picture is reorienting societal norms, and maybe donating money to influence people to change their behavior can do more good than chaning one person's behavior, but it is a false dichotomy to pick between chainging personal behavoir or donating to change societal behaviors. One can do both, and live as you preach. Would it be disingenuous if one were to only donate money in the hopes of changing other people's behavior and not change their own behavior?
I guess eating meat and donating to animal cruelty charities is strictly better than eating meat and not donating to animal cruelty charities. That has to count for something, but it does strike me as weird in the local domain where I could not imagine my capacity to donate to any charities could offset more than my personal participation in a problem given the amount of meat I eat.
