Ethics Offsets

Generalizes carbon offsets to 'ethics offsets': do a thing you feel is wrong, but donate enough that the affected party would prefer (both actions) to (neither). Simple cases (the flight + carbon cleanup; visiting a dictatorship + funding its opposition) seem 100% legit. Two troubling escalations: (II) eat meat but fund vegetarian-conversion ads at $10-50/convert -- which feels like duping people and fails to universalize, yet Scott works the objections and lands on 'weird but ethical' (with a self-limiting maxim once ads saturate); (III) the reductio -- a perfect-crime millionaire murders someone he dislikes but offsets it with $334k of life-saving global-health donations (plus offsets for police time, public fear, even victim-quality), leaving only the Schelling-fence-crossing objection, which he notes could itself be offset. Ends provocatively unresolved.

Quality 72 · Strong. A tight, memorable thought-experiment essay that productively troubles naive consequentialist fungibility; the murder-offset reductio and the Schelling-fence escape are widely remembered and genuinely useful as intuition pumps. Solidly Strong; short and deliberately unresolved, which keeps it from rising further.

Claude’s paradigm shift 58 · Moderate. The 'ethics offsets' generalization and the offset-murder reductio are a fresh, sticky framing of commensurability/fungibility problems, building on standard utilitarian puzzles and his own commensurability work. Notable.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Circulates in EA/rationalist debates about offsetting and commensurability; no material-world effect. Within-blog influence.