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Lukas_Gloor comments on Pay other people to go vegetarian for you? - Less Wrong Discussion
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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).
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.
OK, I see. I just find this hard to defend, at least if we specify that we're talking about the same intensity of suffering. But I guess that this is the point where people declare the ratio a "terminal value" and then the discussion is over.
What I do understand is that some people think killing adult healthy humans is much worse than killing animals, because there you can conceive a clear difference in abilities that at least plausibly seems relevant to the badness of killing. But then for anti-speciesism they should also agree that killing adult healthy humans is intrinsically much worse than killing cognitively disabled people or human infants.
(Also, if killing people is so bad because it violates preferences, then that leads to a handful of counterintuitive conclusions, e.g. having to care about preferences of those already dead.)
Killing adult healthy-minded humans (who want to live) is obviously much worse than killing non-sapient human infants. But historically attempts to single out a group of humans to assign moral value to have turned out badly, so we try not to do that.