How does averting a birth cause an extra child to be born somewhere else?

Just sharing my 2024 Year in Review post from Good Thoughts. It summarizes a couple dozen posts in applied ethics and ethical theory (including issues relating to naive instrumentalism and what I call "non-ideal decision theory") that would likely be of interest to many forum readers. (Plus a few more specialist philosophy posts that may only appeal to a more niche audience.)

Fair enough - I think I agree with that. Something that I discuss a lot in my writing is that we clearly have strong moral reasons to do more good rather than less, but that an over-emphasis on 'obligation' and 'demands' can get in the way of people appreciating this. I think I'm basically channeling the same frustration that you have, but rather than denying that there is such a thing as 'supererogation', I would frame it as emphasizing that we obviously have really good reasons to do supererogatory things, and refusing to do so can even be a straightforward normative error.  See, especially, What Permissibility Could Be, where I emphatically reject the "rationalist" conception of permissibility on which we have no more reason to do supererogatory acts than selfish ones.

I basically agree with Scott. You need to ask what it even means to call something 'obligatory'. For many utilitarians (from Sidgwick to Peter Singer), they mean nothing more than what you have most reason to do. But that is not what anyone else means by the term, which (as J.S. Mill better recognized) has important connections to blameworthiness. So then the question arises why you would think that anything less than perfection was automatically deserving of blame. You might just as well claim that anything better than maximal evil is thereby deserving of praise!

For related discussion, see my posts:

• Deontic Pluralism (on different things that 'ought' and 'obligation' can mean)
• Imperfection is OK! (on how to think about our moral imperfection, and why we needn't feel bad about it--unless we do something far more egregious than just being less than perfect)

And for a systematic exploration of demandingness and its limits (published in a top academic journal), see:

• Willpower Satisficing

I'd say that it's a (putative) instance of adversarial ethics rather than "ends justify the means" reasoning (in the usual sense of violating deontic constraints).

Sometimes that seems OK. Like, it seems reasonable to refrain from rescuing the large man in my status-quo-reversal of the Trolley Bridge case. (And to urge others to likewise refrain, for the sake of the five who would die if anyone acted to save the one.) So that makes me wonder if our disapproval of the present case reflects a kind of speciesism -- either our own, or the anticipated speciesism of a wider audience for whom this sort of reasoning would provide a PR problem?

OTOH, I think the meat-eater problem is misguided anyway, so another possibility is just that mistakenly urging against saving innocent people's lives is especially bad. I guess I do think the moral risk here is sufficient to be extra wary about how one expresses concerns like the meat-eater problem. Like Jason, I think it's much better to encourage AW offsets than to discourage GHD life-saving.

(Offsetting the potential downsides from helping others seems like a nice general solution to the problem of adversarial ethics, even if it isn't strictly optimal.)

I basically agree with the core case for "animal welfare offsetting", and discuss some related ideas in Confessions of a Cheeseburger Ethicist. The main points of resistance I'd flag are just:

• For some people, there may not be any "tradeoff" between going vegan and donating. If you can easily do both, all the better!  So it's worth being clear that the argument isn't really against veganism so much as against investing too much moral effort into becoming vegan (if it would require significant willpower).
• As Jeff notes, there may be better second-order effects from going vegan. Presumably a sufficiently large extra donation could balance those out, but it's very hard to guess what would be sufficient. (I do think there's also value to omnivores like us being public about valuing animal welfare and donating accordingly. That might help reach some different audiences, for example. But I still think it's worth esteeming veganism as a laudatory practice, even if it shouldn't be everyone's top priority.)

Or if any other kind of progress (including moral progress, some of which will come from future people) will eventually abolish factory-farming. I'd be utterly shocked if factory-farming is still a thing 1000+ years from now. But sure, it is a possibility, so you could discount the value of new lives by some modest amount to reflect this risk. I just don't think that will yield the result that marginal population increases are net-negative for the world in expectation.

In the long term, we will hopefully invent forms of delicious meat like cultured meat that do not involve sentient animal suffering... When that happens, pro-natalism might make more sense.

As Kevin Kuruc argues, progress happens from people (or productive person-years), not from the bare passage of time. So we should expect there's some number of productive person-years required to solve this problem. So there simply is no meat-eater problem. As a first-pass model: removing person-years from the present doesn't reduce the number of animals harmed before a solution is found; it just makes the solution arrive later.

One quick reason for thinking that academic philosophy norms should apply to the "institutional critique" is that it appears in works of academic philosophy. If people like Crary et al are just acting as private political actors, I guess they can say whatever they want on whatever flimsy basis they want. But insofar as they're writing philosophy papers (and books published by academic presses) arguing for the institutional critique as a serious objection to Effective Altruism, I'm claiming that they haven't done a competent job of arguing for their thesis.