We all know that it’s better to save five people’s lives than to save only one. But in 1977, one philosopher dared to argue…maybe it isn’t?

“Should the Numbers Count?” by John Taurek is among the few modern philosophy papers that might fairly be described as infamous. When I was taught it as an undergrad, it was presented as something between a cautionary tale and a punching bag, a set of dubious arguments in favor of a conclusion so absurd that it’s astonishing a respected UCLA professor put his name to it. The most prominent reply, from famed Oxford moral philosopher Derek Parfit, was simply titled, “Innumerate Ethics.”

Taurek asks the reader to imagine a situation in which there is “a supply of some lifesaving drugs. Six people will all certainly die if they are not treated with the drug. But one of the six requires all of the drug if he is to survive. Each of the other five requires only one-fifth of the drug.” What should be done?

Most people, Taurek concedes, will conclude that dividing the drug supply five ways, and saving five lives, is better than giving it all to the sixth person (whom he names David). But to conclude this is to make a mistake, he says. Implicit in the idea that the numbers count, he argues, is a belief that you can sum up suffering and happiness between different people, so that the suffering of five people “adds up” to more than the suffering of one.

Taurek objects.

“Suffering is not additive in this way,” he insists. David dying is bad for David. One of David’s five rivals for the drugs dying is bad for that person. There is no such thing as “bad for the world” or “bad, full stop.”

“I am not to compare [David’s] loss, on the one hand, to the collective or total loss to these five, on the other, whatever exactly that is supposed to be,” he concludes. “Rather, I should compare what David stands to suffer or lose, if I do not prevent it, to what will be suffered or lost by any other person, if I do not prevent that.”

None of the five others will suffer more by dying than David would. Thus, Taurek claims, the drug’s owner should not reflexively save the five instead of David. She should, rather, flip a coin: heads the five live, tails David lives. That is the best way to show equal concern for each person.

When I first read Taurek, my reaction was: Is this guy fucking with me? Would he flip a coin not between one and five but between one and a million? A billion? Would a world leader be justified in allowing a nuclear strike to go forward, if doing so saved his best friend and no one else? What exactly is wrong with this man?

I, apparently, was not alone in this reaction. Parfit — who was legendarily even-tempered and courteous, especially for a philosopher — was made so furious by the argument that by the end he was reduced to lecturing Taurek the way one would a preschooler: “Why do we save the larger number? Because we do give equal weight to saving each. Each counts for one. That is why more count for more.”

And yet over the years I have encountered a few philosophers and philosophy-adjacent folks who are, if not totally on board with Taurek, at least Taurek-curious. They’re skeptical that the numbers count, the way I intuitively feel they must count.

I didn’t understand, really, where such a person could possibly be coming from. I didn’t understand, that is, until the shrimp.

Consider the prawn

Let’s say that, contra Taurek, the numbers do count. Here are a few numbers.

There are, as of this writing, roughly 8.1 billion human beings on Earth. Per the research group Faunalytics, humans worldwide killed about 310 million cows for meat in 2023; 480 million rabbits; 520 million turkeys; 540 million goats; a little under 700 million sheep; 790 million geese; and 1.5 billion pigs. We also killed 4.2 billion ducks and 78 billion chickens.

What that means is that we slaughter something like 3.5 billion mammals a year, and over 20 times as many birds.

But just as there’s a gap between mammals and birds, there is an ever bigger gap between birds and fish. No one knows with certainty how many fish humans kill each year. One recent paper estimated the number of “finfish,” as distinct from shellfish, killed on farms in 2019 at between 78 and 171 billion. Even the low-end number would equal the number of chickens killed every year, meaning the total number of fish deaths almost certainly swamps that of land animals. And that’s just farmed fish. Another paper by two of the researchers from the farmed fish paper puts the number of wild-caught finfish at an average of 1.1 to 2.2 trillion per year.

If the numbers count, then surely it follows that the most pressing matter in the world of animal rights is the plight of the shrimp.

What of shellfish, though? The research group Rethink Priorities estimated recently that roughly 440 billion

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