The USDA secretary released a strategy yesterday on lowering egg prices. Explained originally as a WSJ opinion (paywall). Summarized here without the paywall.

Five points to the strategy:

• $500 million for a biosecurity program to limit transmission of avian flu
• $400 million to farmers to recover after an outbreak
• $100 million for vaccines
• Look to ease regulations, especially overriding California Proposition 12 that banned the sale of eggs from caged hens.
• Look to allow temporary imports of eggs

Key concerns:

• Enacting a key-goal of the EATS act to override state humane treatment regulations without legislation
• Imports from lower-welfare countries
• All companies that have committed to going cage-free this year using the USDA response as an excuse to delayed or revoke their commitment.

I'm curious where the non-cage free eggs are going. From my naive position, it seems like the grocery stores and restaurant chains listed here should cover a majority of egg use, and are well above 40% cage-free in aggregate. Do non-chain restaurants explain the difference? Hotels? Food manufacturers? Schools and other public places with cafeterias?

"The important question is whether eating meat and donating is morally better than eating meat and not donating. The answer to that seems like a resounding 'yes'"

Offsetting bad moral actions depends on 1) the action being off-settable, 2) the two actions are inseparable, and 3) presuming a rather extreme form of utilitarianism is morally correct.

In the case you provide, I think it fails on all three parts. The action isn't off-settable. Most moral frameworks would look at the two actions separately. Donating to an animal welfare charity doesn't first require you eat meat, and there is no forced decision to donate or not donate if you eat an animal. And if you accept moral offsetting is better in this case, you are upon to all sorts of the standard utilitarian critiques.

There are also separate justice concerns and whether you are benefiting the appropriate reference class (if you eat cow and donate to shrimp welfare in another country, is that appropriate offsetting?).

I think it's fine to promote the endeavor (or at least its morally permissible). But saying it is morally better isn't well-supported. It's similar to the somewhat non-intuitive finding in moral philosophy that if choosing between A) not donating to charity, B) donating to an ineffective charity, and C) donating to an effective charity, choosing A over B may be morally permissible, but choosing B over C is not.

Do you agree with Susan Wolf's claim in Moral Saints that we ought to consider non-moral values in deciding what we do, and those may be a valid reason to not given more to the worst off? I presume you've written about it before on your blog or in a paper.

A related question is: do you think the gap is greater between our actions and what we think we ought to do, or between what we think ought to do and what we ought to do in some realist meta-normative sense? Is the bigger issue that we lack moral knowledge, or that we don't live up to moral standards?

It's difficult to pinpoint a definition of conservatism. Modern politics tends to follow in the Burkean conservatism tradition. One of the animating forces is the belief that hierarchy is necessary for a just an prosperous society. It is to varying degrees a "might makes right" value system, summed up in this quote by Plato: " ...nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior."

Another style is Christian conservatism with dominionism, that believe animals are biblically placed on earth for humans to do with as we please. Many still believe in Descartes Cartesian dualism that humans are distinct from animals in that animals do not have consciousness and even cannot "experience" pain.

These belief systems are unlikely to yield concern for animals, and are usually ambivalent to them. There may be some appeal to a "with great power comes great responsibility" mindset that animals are weak and need our protection.

Another angle is to realize many wear the label of conservative loosely, and can be persuaded to adopt or appreciate other value systems that are much more concerned with the well-being of animals.

I think it is more likely than not that failure to pass this bill as is was net harmful.

• Ozone air cleaners are a significant source of indoor air pollution, producing indoor particulate levels just slightly less than second hand smoke. Particulates account for 85%+ of morbidity from indoor air pollution in residences. There is a serious harm in keeping these air cleaners on the market. All major health and air quality organizations oppose them. But there is no ban on their sale, so they remain available to uninformed customers. Killing this bill keeps a major harm on the market.
• There are many pollution control technologies besides Far-UVC that can reduce infection risk, including UV technologies at longer wavelengths that do not produce ozone. Far-UVC is not a far superior technology, and it's not clear to me that a setback in the Far-UVC industry meaningfully delays adoption of infection control technologies generally.
• Scrubbers are likely going to be necessary on Far-UVC devices because of how much pollution they produce. As HVAC engineers, we have a duty of care that will likely prohibit using control technologies that worsen indoor air quality. There isn't an easy solution to the problem beyond scrubbers; if you use ventilation or filtration to control it, you could have just gone with a ventilation or filtration solution from the start.
• The majority of CA buildings are in a mild climate and energy recovery and or economizing is likely going to be a cheaper solution overall compared to room air cleaners in new facilities.

Overall, I'm discouraged at the broad EA obsession with Far-UVC instead of coordinating with leading organizations like ASHRAE to promote the uptake of infectious disease control standards and design generally. In this case, that obsession did cause clear harm, with unclear benefit.

You can buy whey made from precision fermentation (PerfectDay). That changes several elements of your post, particularly the claim that whey is necessarily not vegan.

"we are biologically programmed to not care when eating animal flesh" this isn't obvious or intuitive to me. It seems like our attitudes toward eating animals are largely culturally conditioned. Regardless, even if it is "innate", a personal insensitivity to animals is not a moral reason to treat them as interchangeable, expendable, or offsetable.

It seems your justifications for offsets are bit of fanatic consequentialism and a belief that animals do not deserve similar moral status as humans.

Two points in response. First, many vegans were similarly callous towards animals before they became vegan. Cognitive dissonance is incredibly powerful. It's why many vegans first went vegan for health reasons, then were able to earnestly consider animal moral status, and then stayed vegan for the animals. Second, I think you should be horrified at how some animals are treated as if they were human. Pigs for example are similar enough in biology that they are used for organ transplants and to test painkiller efficacy. There don't seem to be good reasons to think the experience of pain to a pig is all that different from that of a human infant.

A useful test when moral theorizing about animals is to swap "animals" with "humans" and see if your answer changes substantially. In this example, if the answer changes, the relevant difference for you isn't about pure expected value consequentialism, it's about some salient difference between the rights or moral status of animals vs. humans. Vegans tend to give significant, even equivalent, moral status to some animals used for food. If you give near-equal moral status to animals, "offsetting meat eating by donating to animal welfare orgs" is similar to "donating to global health charities to offset hiring a hitman to target a group of humans". There are a series of rebuttals, counter-rebuttals, etc. to this line of reasoning. Not going to get into all of them. But suffice to say that in the animal welfare space, an animal welfarist carnivore is hesitantly trusted - it signals either a lack of commitment or discipline, a diet/health struggle, a discordant belief that animals deserve far less rights and moral status as humans, or (much rarer) a fanatic consequentialist ideology that thinks offsetting human killing is morally coherent and acceptable. A earnest carnivore that cares a lot about animal welfare is incredibly rare.

Maximization is not as simple as choosing the single action the produces the most benefit; actions are not necessary exclusive. If I go to the grocery store, I don't only by beans because I think they have the highest nutritional value per dollar. I buy other things too, and need to be because beans alone are insufficient. One can donate to animal welfare charities and be vegan; those aren't exclusive.