For the last few years I’ve been avoiding factory farmed eggs because I think they involve a lot of unnecessary suffering. I’m hesitant to be part of that even if it’s not a big deal on utilitarian grounds. This is a pain since factory-farmed eggs are used all over the place (e.g. in ice cream, pastries, pasta…). I’d prefer just spend a bit of money and not think too much about what I eat.

In this post I’ll describe a possible offsetting strategy that I think is unusually robust and should be satisfying for many moral perspectives. The same proposal would also apply to many other animal products and potentially to the environmental impacts of consumption.

Proposal

I think it’s possible to produce humane eggs where hens have positive lives and nothing horrifying happens to anyone. So my ideal would be to buy and use humane eggs. But this is tough since most of the time I’m eating eggs that someone else used as an ingredient (and even when I’m using them myself acquiring really humane eggs is kind of a pain).

So here’s an alternative that seems easier and just as good:

Some people raise humane eggs.
They sell these on the wholesale market as if they were totally normal eggs.
An inspector verifies that hens are treated extremely well and that they have sold N eggs on the wholesale market.
The inspector issues N “humane egg” certificates to the producer.
The producer sells these certificates in an online marketplace in order to cover the extra costs of humane eggs.
Whenever I eat an egg, I buy a humane egg certificate to go with it.

Analysis

If I buy an egg and a humane egg certificate, what is the net effect on the world?

Buying the egg increased demand for eggs. If I hadn’t also bought a certificate, that would indirectly cause someone to make one more factory-farmed egg.

Buying the positive-welfare certificate means that someone sold a wholesale egg on my behalf and increased the supply of eggs. If I hadn’t also bought an egg, that would indirectly cause someone to make one less factory-farmed egg.

So my net effect on factory farmed eggs is zero. It’s as if I was making my own positive-welfare egg and eating it, with no effect on how many factory-farmed eggs other people make or eat.

(In reality both of these actions will have other effects, e.g. causing other people to eat more or fewer eggs, but I think they still cancel out perfectly.)

This is an unusu...

Ethical Offsets