Anonymous
7/14/2025, 5:49:17 PM No.5016282
It's surprisingly easy to be a much more ethical omnivore
You can cause vastly less suffering to animals without going vegan
In my view, eating meat in the modern era is seriously morally wrong. Most animals live extremely terrible lives in factory farms—because of a century of hideous genetic engineering, they live in constant pain. Around 99% of animals live in dark, cramped, squalid conditions, with too little space to move or spread their wings, choking on filth and ammonia and feces. Horrific mutilation—tail-docking, debeaking, dehorning—is routine. Transport is stressful and often fatal.
Despite this, most people continue to eat meat, generally without thinking much about their meat consumption. This is a mistake; it’s easy to cause vastly less cruelty with your animal consumption even if you keep eating animal products. While I think meat eating is wrong, it’s not all equally wrong. There are three big ways you can cause much less suffering through your consumption of animal products.
1 Offset
The first way is: offset. Offsetting is the practice of donating to charities that reverse the negative impact one has on the world. For example, if you fly a lot, you might donate to offset your carbon emissions by giving money to a charity reversing carbon emissions. Overall, by offsetting you make your aggregate impact zero or positive.
Now, there are some thorny ethical questions about the permissibility of offsetting (for instance, it’s not typically thought that an assassin can get off scot-free by donating a few thousand bucks to the Against Malaria Foundation each time they perform an assassination). But clearly offsetting is vastly better than doing nothing. It is much better to have a neutral impact on animals than to have a strongly negative impact on them.
You can cause vastly less suffering to animals without going vegan
In my view, eating meat in the modern era is seriously morally wrong. Most animals live extremely terrible lives in factory farms—because of a century of hideous genetic engineering, they live in constant pain. Around 99% of animals live in dark, cramped, squalid conditions, with too little space to move or spread their wings, choking on filth and ammonia and feces. Horrific mutilation—tail-docking, debeaking, dehorning—is routine. Transport is stressful and often fatal.
Despite this, most people continue to eat meat, generally without thinking much about their meat consumption. This is a mistake; it’s easy to cause vastly less cruelty with your animal consumption even if you keep eating animal products. While I think meat eating is wrong, it’s not all equally wrong. There are three big ways you can cause much less suffering through your consumption of animal products.
1 Offset
The first way is: offset. Offsetting is the practice of donating to charities that reverse the negative impact one has on the world. For example, if you fly a lot, you might donate to offset your carbon emissions by giving money to a charity reversing carbon emissions. Overall, by offsetting you make your aggregate impact zero or positive.
Now, there are some thorny ethical questions about the permissibility of offsetting (for instance, it’s not typically thought that an assassin can get off scot-free by donating a few thousand bucks to the Against Malaria Foundation each time they perform an assassination). But clearly offsetting is vastly better than doing nothing. It is much better to have a neutral impact on animals than to have a strongly negative impact on them.
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