Ah goddamnit, the non-identity problem is crucial - re read chappell on that, plus the sep article. How can you preserve the idea that you have reasons to help people because it’s good for them without being committed to the person affecting view whereby an act is only bad/wrong if it makes someone worse off.
Just realised that the permissibility of moral offsetting also hinges on whether the disvalue/value pair of the offset are distinct intrinsic values or instrumental (either causally or constitutively - will that matter?) to the same value. That suggests chappells distinction really is morally important.
I wonder how all this would apply to collective action cases though - in these cases aren’t all our impacts just constitutive means to some larger intrinsic value? If so does that mean moral offsetting is always permissible within the context of a single collective action? It doesn’t mean collective actions can always be offset. Why does offsetting always seem more permissible in collective action cases?
Does all this stuff get really weird depending on what intrinsic values there are? Types or tokens? Just token monism I guess. How might it relate to Aristotle’s conception of the good?
What about if all action is collective action? How might that effect things? How about just eating meat under capitalism?
Are there differences in benefitting and harming price by high variance vs low variance/voluntary actions - like coin flipping in trolley dilemmas or nprt consideration or accident/mistake stuff? It has something to do with real people suffering temporal harms vs counterparts or sets of counterparts suffering harms maybe, one is a logical construct out of the ground level elements but the other is a direct interaction with the ground level elements.