A question I asked myself recently was "How much, and to whom, do I have to donate in order to offset the measurable negative impacts of my lifestyle?"
This was a surprisingly difficult question to answer, so I decided to do some research and make a website to make it easier for other people to answer the same question.
I'm a firmware engineer by training and profession, NOT a professional writer, cause evaluator, or philosopher, so I'll try to let my website do most of the talking–but I'll try to answer some questions here, and would love to talk about this idea in the comments if you find the website engaging.
What's the basic idea of leavenoharm.org?
The goal of leavenoharm.org is to make donating easier, specifically to impact areas where a persons lifestyle has a net impact. This means clear recommendations to
- Animal Welfare through FarmKind.
- Climate Impact through Giving Green.
- Habitat Destruction through Rainforest Trust.
- Plastic Waste through Plastic Bank.
My thesis here is that many people want to do more good to "make up" for the negative impacts that they know their lifestyle causes, like non-human animal harm because of their diet or climate impact because of air travel. The two obvious ways to reduce the overall amount of negative impact (or increase the overall amount of positive impact) are:
- Lifestyle change to reduce direct impact (e.g. going vegan).
- Donate to offset the negative impact (where leavenoharm.org comes in).
My goal here is to make doing 2 as trivial as possible, where the only bottleneck is someone's ability/desire to fund the offsetting. Right now much of the bottleneck is knowing where and how much to donate.
That means I have a very opinionated set of target funds and ignore many traditional EA cause areas like global health and AI safety. I only recommend cause areas that have impact from an increase in the number of people living in surplus, and I only recommend one target fund in each cause area to make donating as easy as possible.
Why should I use leavenoharm.org
- I have a calculator that lets you put in information about your lifestyle and see how much you need to donate to each cause area in order to offset your impact.
- I have a dashboard that lets you track how your donations are trending. This lets you track your impact and know at what point you will have 'left no harm' by donating enough to offset all of your projected lifetime harm.
My friends who I have shown this to say the calculator is fun to use, give it a try!
Is moral offsetting good? What about...?
There has been discussion on the EA forums around the validity of moral offsetting. My general thoughts around this are:
It might be the case that becoming vegan + donating to effective charities is more effective than just donating to effective charities, but I have a very difficult time believing that donating to effective charities is bad. I have an extremely difficult time imagining that leavenoharm.org would increase the overall amount of suffering in the world.
My positive argument here is that I think pushing for more moral offsetting will cause more positive lifestyle changes than the world where we don't push for any more moral offsetting. This idea looks something like "inertia" in doing good, where people who start doing more good will enjoy the feeling and will try to find ways to do more good (like donating more or enacting positive behavior change) rather than making negative behavior change. I don't have data or sources to back up this hypothesis, but I also haven't seen any data that shows that people who participate in moral offsetting increase the amount of negative behavior they do after offsetting.
Are you sure your math is sound?
I did my best. I used ChatGPT (around GPT 5.1 I think) and Gemini 3 Pro (Deep Research) for all of my research and the vast majority of text on the website. All of my findings and math are on the website in one page or another.
If you think my math or research is wrong in any way please let me know! I'd love to make everything as accurate as possible, with the knowledge that there will be some tradeoff between:
- The uncertainty in how much good the next marginal dollar will cause to any given charity can best be modeled as a range of possible outcomes with high uncertainty. For example, how confident can I be that the marginal ton of CO₂e is offset with $10? From what I can find it seems to be somewhere in the possible range of $1-20.
- I want the website to give confident, simple numbers so people don't have to think about the uncertainty ranges. I want them to be given a simple number with no uncertainty, and explain the uncertainty further into the site if they dig further.
What are your future plans for this?
- Set up an organization that can take funding so people can donate directly to leavenoharm.org rather than the individual charities. I want people to put in information about themselves, decide how much they want to donate to each charity, set up a single monthly donation, and go about their lives. The less friction here the better.
- More automation. Set up systems to pull in new cause areas, add new questions to the calculator, and recalculate the updated impact of the marginal dollar. These numbers will change over time and I would like the site to always be updated with the latest information.
- Make the site more sharable and social. Something that you can share to socials that says "I care about doing good and I donate enough to offset the negative impacts of my lifestyle"
- Get the calculator working for non-americans.
- Point people to more causes. After they donate, I expect people to ask "What now? Where should I donate?" One answer might be more donations to the recommended causes, but another answer might be guiding them to more EA information and other effective charities.
Cool project!
One point of improvement I noticed was that when it asked for zip-code you could only add American ones, I would suggest adding an option to choose different countries! I think the platform could be especially popular with Europeans, so I would suggest focusing on adding those countries first.
Anyway, I like the platform and I feel like it has a lot of potential to do good. Good work!
A nit
appeals to me, I'm sure to some others, but (I sense) could come across with a particular political-tribal flavour, which you might want to try neutralising. (Or not! if that'd detract from the net appeal)
Just generally, I like the idea of putting something out there in the world even if the first version isn’t perfect :)
I appreciate this! There's a bunch more I want to do with this but I figured it's in a good enough place to start getting feedback from other people.
Really cool! Easy to use and looks great. Some feedback:
The word "offsetting" seems to have bad PR. But I quite like "Leave no harm" and "a clean slate". I think the general idea could be really compelling to certain parts of the population. There is at least some subsection of the population that thinks about charity in a "guilty conscious" sense. Maybe guilt is a good framing, especially since it is more generalizable here than most charities are capable of eliciting.
I'm certainly not an expert on this, but I wonder if this could have particular appeal to religious groups? The concept of "Ahimsa" in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism seems relevant.
Last suggestion: Air pollution may be a good additional category of harms. I'm not sure what the best charity target would be though, given that it is hyper regional. Medical research? Could also add second-hand cigarette smoke to that.
Seems like the best bet is to make it as comprehensive as possible, without overly diluting the most important and evidence backed stuff like farmed animal welfare.
Yeah not great, but personally I think of it as a good thing so part of the hope with this is to turn the corner on the feeling of "offsetting".
My goal is to make this site stick with people who are not familiar with EA in any way and possibly be a stepping stone from impact due to personal responsibility into impact for the sake of doing more good, regardless of how the opportunity got there. In order to do this I think I need to tap into the "do you have a vague, persistent sense of guilt" feeling and give the solution very quickly after. It's definitely a balance between "think about the guilt of not doing this" vs "think about the pride you'll feel after doing this" and going too hard in either direction here I think will be a huge turn off for most people.
I don't think I'd like to put religious framing on the site but connecting to communities who resonate with this kind of thing seems very useful.
I'll do some research on this but I think this is covered by Climate? What are you imagining is air pollution harm but not climate harm?
I don't have a good data source on hand, but my understanding is that pollution from car travel is particularly harmful to local air quality. Whereas, for instance, emissions from plane travel less so.
But yes, I assume some portion of Giving Green's grantees do work that benefit air quality at least second hand. It could be included in the calculator as a harm but just directed to Giving Green as well.
Thanks for doing this, Myles! I strongly upvoted your post.
I do not know whether improving the conditions of farmed animals, and mitigating global warming, habitat destruction, and plastic waste increase or decrease welfare due to potentially dominant uncertain effects on soil animals and microorganisms. However, I still think offseting the effects of personal consumption by funding the most cost-effective interventions is a good norm to spread.
I can imagine donating to these causes has hidden second-order effects with a chance to make the whole donation negative impact. My goal is definitely NOT to be on the cutting edge of moral philosophy with this site, just to make the kinds of information I feel will click easily with people more accessible.
Love that you're exploring microorganism welfare that seems interesting and like not many people have thought it through.
A very cool idea and nice implementation, thanks for sharing! I sympathize a lot with the idea and "we take responsibility to correct negative consequences of our actions where feasible" could be a good norm to coordinate around.
Some comments
I think this makes a lot of sense! It can be tricky to get the balance right and at the moment I think some formulations that try to emphasize clarity err in the direction of being too confident - but I fully understand that it is a lot of effort to do these things well.
Formulations on the website:
The formulation "the four cause areas where your money can do the most good" seems mistaken? If I got this right, the reasoning is to effectively undo (offset) the harms associated with one's personal lifestyle for major areas individually. The effectiveness mostly enters when deciding on which org to donate to within the chosen cause area. Of course, to some degree, the cause areas are still chosen with effectiveness in mind but I think that a different formulation could capture the reasoning better. A suggestion might be
"Inspired by effective altruism principles, for each of the major areas where our lifestyle comes along with negative impact, we've identified where your money can do the most good—and calculated how much it takes to balance your share."
I feel the formulation "undo/offset my impact" is a little unfortunate as, in my mind, impact mainly is related to intended and thus positive consequences. It takes a little extra concentration to realize that in this case I do want to get rid of the impact. On the other hand, I cannot find a similarly short alternative formulation. Maybe "rectify your impact" could work?
Agreed here. I think my website errs on the side of overconfident right now but I feel like that will help engagement for now. Maybe later I can try to surface more of the uncertainty.
This is a really good callout, especially because I'm not actually sure (and think it's slightly unlikely) that these are actually the areas where you can do the most good. They're just the areas that I think people hold a disproportionate amount of guilt towards.
Agreed with the sentiment and I also haven't landed on wording I feel super confident about. I'm thinking about toying around with "harmful impact" to keep the branding around harm consistent. Not sure I agree that impact is just intended, in my mind it's the result of what you do regardless of intention, but I'm not sure how many people share my view. I'll keep workshopping this wording.
Executive summary: The author presents leavenoharm.org, a website designed to make “moral offsetting” easy by calculating how much individuals should donate to specific charities to offset the negative impacts of their lifestyle, and argues that this approach is unlikely to increase harm and may encourage more overall good.
Key points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
Happy to see something like this. I did notice I got $3.45 for animal suffering despite being vegan, just curious as to why that is? (I don't think being vegan eliminates animal suffering entirely, I just want to know the reasoning). I imagine there are a lot of kinks to iron out, but I like the concept a lot :)
This is a bug, I'll make sure it's fixed by the end of the day and your recommendation for animal welfare goes down to 0. Thanks for giving it a shot!
I assume there are some vegans out there who have a very small but non-zero impact on animal suffering due to other parts of their lifestyle, probably something around high climate impact causing suffering to non factory farmed animals, but it's not directly causal enough for my site. I want the chain from "I do this thing" to "It has this impact" to be pretty straightforward.