The Offsetting Puzzle
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Deontology
10 min read
The article heavily discusses deontological moral frameworks when analyzing why murder offsetting fails while climate offsetting might succeed. Understanding deontology's emphasis on duties and rights-violations versus consequences is essential to following the philosophical argument.
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Carbon offsets and credits
16 min read
The article's first and most extensively defended case involves carbon offsetting for air travel. Readers would benefit from understanding the actual mechanisms, controversies, and effectiveness debates around carbon offsets as a real-world practice.
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Trolley problem
17 min read
The article's discussion of killing one to save many, and whether the structure of the causal chain matters morally, directly parallels the trolley problem thought experiments that have shaped modern ethical philosophy. The author's point about the serum case vs. the donation case echoes classic trolley variants.
Moral offsetting is the practice of making up for a bad or prima facie wrongful action by doing something else that is good enough to outweigh the bad act. What should we think about this?
I don’t have a definite thesis about it, so I’m just going to ramble about how offsetting is puzzling and some things we might say about it.
1. Three Cases of Offsetting
(i) Climate
Say you think it’s bad to contribute to climate change, but you like to fly on airplanes. So, every time you fly, you donate money to plant some trees, which more than offsets your contribution to global warming, such that your net impact is to reduce global warming.
(ii) Meat
Assume that it is normally wrong to buy meat, perhaps for the obvious reasons discussed here and here. So, for each time you eat meat, you might decide to donate a certain amount of money to Vegan Outreach, sufficient to reduce animal cruelty by enough to outweigh the harm caused by your meat purchase. Does this make the meat purchase permissible?
If so, must the donation be to an animal charity? Could one, say, offset meat eating by donating to the Against Malaria Foundation, which has nothing to do with animal welfare but is nevertheless doing a lot of good?
(iii) Murder
Suppose you think that murder is wrong, but you really hate your neighbor. You decide to kill him but then donate a large amount of money to charity, so as to save many more lives than the one that you took. Does this make the murder permissible?
2. The Case for Offsetting
So here’s an argument. Let B be some bad action, let O be the offsetting action, let N be the “action” of doing neither B nor O, and let “x+y” be the action of doing both x and y.
N is permissible.
B+O is better than N.
(x)(y) If x is permissible, and y is better than x, then y is permissible.
Therefore, B+O is permissible.
This seemingly works for all three cases of offsetting above.
However, if you’re a deontologist, you might think that (3) is false; you might say that rightness is not so simply determined by facts about what is better and worse. (It can be wrong to save five lives at the cost of one life, even though in some
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