If you continue to buy meat, can you neutralize the effect you have on factory farmed animal suffering (for example), by spending money on charities that try to stop factory farming?
For this poll, the answerer decides what in particular is bad about factory farming.
Inspired by: https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-bone-chilling-evil-of-factory
See https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/lewis-bollard (video + article) for the claim that "$1 can prevent 10 years of animal suffering".
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As long as people want to buy factory farmed meat, those practices will continue to exist, unless enough money is donated to for instance globally outlaw factory farming.
I think that in the money-driven world we live in, there exists a large enough sum of money that could outweigh nearly any moral failing that an individual could commit, with the limit being placed by inflation at at least several trillion dollars.
If you were to spend 100$ per year buying factory farmed meat (easy number) that is sort of giving some money to the fight for factory farming. Im sure there is some multiple of the amount you spend on factory farmed meat that you could donate to offset your moral effect, even under something dumb like kantianism.
@jim by specifying "moral effect on factory farming" in the title and "neutralize the effect you have on factory farmed animal suffering" in the description, I think the question is forcing every respondent into a consequentialist framework no matter what their personal theory of morality is.
@AbuElBanat But it would seem natural for consequentialist, such as a traditional utiliterian, to say that one is morally obligated to avoid factory farming and to donate money to effective charities.
@AbuElBanat it's like saying you can neutralise the effect of a murder by not committing another murder. But not committing another murder is already your moral obligation! You're not "offsetting", you're just doing what you're morally compelled to do in any case!
@jim But the question didn't ask anything about what anyone's moral obligation is. It asked "can you neutralize the effect you have on factory farmed animal suffering". I think that is almost tautologically true, even conceeding that it is still immoral to eat factory farmed meat. Maybe I am being too literal? Was this not the intent of the question?
I think the analogy would be a well-poisoned asking of the trolley problem -- "If you force a trolley to run over one person, can you neutralize the effect you have on trolley-induced deaths by preventing trolleys from running over any X number of people"? There too I'd feel forced to say yes because it's just not even raising the question of what my moral obligation is.
@AbuElBanat I think the implication is that it would be OK to eat factory farmed animals as long as you donate an appropriate amount to neutralise the (supposed) bad you're doing.
If you continue to buy meat, can you neutralize the effect you have on factory farmed animal suffering (for example), by spending money on charities that try to stop factory farming?
@jim i see. I think I was too literal in reading the question (its a known problem for me!), and regret my answer. At least thanks to your comment this dialogue is here to make it clear that some "yes" voters do NOT in fact think it is OK to eat factory farmed animals as long as you donate enough to neutralize the effect on factory farming writ large.