Wait, is the OP suggesting that the offsetting money should not go to the most effective animal outreach charities? Sure, I agree that "justice for different causes" has no place within consequentialism, but then why use the $11/year as a metric? Wouldn't it make more sense to just "purchase" the amount of utility of going vegetarian for a year by donating to the most cost-effective charity (from all causes)?
(That is of course assuming that "offsetting" makes sense within consequentialism. I think it only does so given a couple of assumptions for willpower, guilt, relief and so on.)
Additionally, eleven dollars per year won't buy you that many QALYs if donated to GiveWell's top recommendations. You'd have to value animal suffering at least two orders of magnitude less to claim that poverty-related causes dominate, and that's not even taking into account the multiplier effect behind animal charities (vegetarians creating more vegetarians) and the poor meat-eater problem).
You'd have to value animal suffering at least two orders of magnitude less to claim that poverty-related causes.
Value the suffering of 1 human over 100 animals? I would, and I think that's pretty common even among people who care about animal suffering. For example, upthread we have approximately 1:1000.
I notice that a large fraction of Effective Altruism people are vegetarian. This makes sense: in general Effective Altruists take moral issues seriously, even when that means changing your lifestyle. I'm not sure it's a good balance, though.
One way to think about this is to convert it into money. How much would I need to be paid to give up eating meat? All animal products? How much money would I need to spend on myself to be about as happy as I would be with less money but continuing to eat animals? I'd probably be willing to go vegetarian for about $500/year, vegan for maybe $2000/year.
It turns out you can probably pay to convince other people to be vegetarian much more cheaply than that. I estimate the cost of a vegetarian-year at $4.29 to $536 while Brian Tomasik estimates $11 with better methodology (which I looked at). This is by placing ads on facebook for a site where people can watch an animial cruelty video and ideally become vegetarian or vegan.
If you would get more than $11/year worth of enjoyment out of continuing to eat meat, why not give $11/year to convince someone else to not eat meat for you? Or give $50/year and be on the safe side?
(While you're giving money, you should probably give it to the organization that you think will do the most good with it, which I think is probably one of GiveWell's top charities. The nice thing about money as opposed to actions is that it's easy to redirect.)
I also posted this on my blog.