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Can we offset immorality?

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People ‘offset’ bad actions in various ways. The most salient example of offsetting is probably carbon offsetting, where we pay a company to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere by roughly the same amount that we put in. But there are arguably more mundane examples of acts that look a

People ‘offset’ bad actions in various ways. The most salient example of offsetting is probably carbon offsetting, where we pay a company to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere by roughly the same amount that we put in. But there are arguably more mundane examples of acts that look a lot like offsetting (“I know I promised I’d make it to your game tonight, but I have to work late. I’ll take you out to dinner to make up for it!”). Let’s call an action intended to offset immoral behavior ‘moral offsetting’. In this post I want to ask a couple of questions: first, what is moral offsetting? Second

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