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Dylan Matthews / Narrator (1:08)

We all know 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 Torek 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 that was so absurd it was astonishing that a respected professor would put his name to it. Here's how it goes. Imagine there's six people. They're all very sick, and they're all going to die if they don't get treated with life saving medicine. Five of those six people need just one pill and they'll survive. The sixth person, let's call him David, needs five pills to survive. It just so happens you have exactly five pills. What should you do? Most people, Torick concedes, will conclude that dividing the drug supply five ways, saving five lives is better than giving it all to David. But this would be a mistake. The conclusion that it's better to save five than one, he argues, is based on a belief that you can somehow sum up suffering and happiness between different people so that the suffering of five people adds up to more than the suffering of one. Toric objects Suffering is not additive. In this way, he insists, David dying is bad for David. One of the other five sick people dying is bad for that person. There's no such thing as bad for the world or bad full stop. David is just One guy, you can't compare his suffering to that of the other five people all put together. That's not fair to David. Toric is basically saying you should compare apples to apples. Is David dying better than one of the others dying? No, right? None of the five others will suffer more by dying than David would. Thus, Toric argues that the drug's owner should not just reflexively save the 5. Instead of David, she should instead 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 Toric, my reaction was basically, is this guy fucking with me? Would he flip a coin, not just like between one and five, but say it's one in a million. One in a billion. Like, imagine a world leader who wants to do a nuclear strike just to save his best friend. He knows a billion people will die, but he wants to save his best friend. Is that okay? Does John Torick think that's okay? Like, what is wrong with this man? I apparently was not alone in this reaction. A moral philosopher named Derek Parfit, who was legendarily even tempered and courteous even for a philosopher, was made so furious by Toric's argument that by the end of the essay he wrote in reply, he was sort of reduced to lecturing Torick the way you would a preschooler. Why do we save the larger number? He wrote, because we do give equal weight to saving each. Each one counts for one. That is why more count for more. And yet, over the years, I've encountered a few philosophers and philosophy adjacent folks who are, if totally on board with Toric, at least Toric curious. They're skeptical that the numbers matter. I didn't really understand where a person like that could possibly be coming from. Or rather, I didn't understand until the shrimp. This is unexplainable. I'm Dylan Matthews and today on the show we consider the prawn. Let's say that Toric is wrong and the numbers do count. Here then, are a couple of numbers. There are, as of this moment, roughly 8.1 billion human beings on Earth. According to the research group Faunalytics, those humans killed about 3.5 billion mammals in 2023 and over 20 times as many birds, including 78 billion chickens. But just as there's a gap between mammals and birds, there's an even bigger gap between birds and fish. No one knows with any kind of certainty how many fish humans kill each year. What about shellfish, though? The research group Rethink Priorities estimated recently that roughly 440 billion shrimp are killed on farms each year and they expect that number to hit 760 billion by 2033. So those are the numbers. Now, suppose you care about animals welfare, or at least you think that humans have some kind of duties to the animals that we raise in farms, or that we take from the wild in order to feed ourselves. Suppose further that you think shrimp count even a little bit. They don't count as much as a human, they don't count as much as a cow, maybe even a trout. But suppose they still count in some way as animals that are capable of feeling pain and are worthy of some consideration. 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. It is all well and good for 22 year old me to furiously insist in a philosophy seminar that John Torick is a madman. And of course the number should count. But if that is so, should these numbers count? Does the seemingly basic conclusion of wanting to save five humans ahead of one commit me to a kind of totalizing shrimp fanaticism? How far down this road is 35 year old me willing to walk? Andres Jimenez Zurria has walked down this road at least a little ways. In 2020, he left a career private equity to co found shrimp welfare project, which is exactly what it sounds like when I asked Jimenezeria about his switch. Some of his explanations feel like what someone would say if they're leaving a finance job to work at a soup kitchen, or quitting a lucrative plastic surgery practice to help civilians injured in war. He just wanted to do some good. My wife works with refugees, he told me, and I started to compare what she was doing and what I was doing. At some point I decided I should be doing something beyond just making someone else richer. So he joined a group that helps people create new charities. The group gave him a menu of serious problems not currently attracting much charitable attention. One of the items on that menu, as on many menus, was shrimp. At first, him and his zaria recalled thinking, these folks have really lost their minds. Then he kept reading and he saw the massive number of shrimp being farmed every year and the evidence that shrimp are sentient, that they are at the very least able to feel pain, able to suffer, and the fact that literally no one on planet Earth seemed to care. So before he knew it, he was founding a shrimp welfare group. It is, to his knowledge, still the only group singularly dedicated to helping shrimp in the world. You should talk to him in his zorria sometime. He's very effective at taking your views of the shrimp dilemma out of the philosophy seminar and into the ice slurry. The ice slurry is one of the major methods through which shrimp are killed or not killed, so much as transported while slowly dying. In theory, the low temperature in the slurry stuns the shrimp before they die, so they don't feel pain as they freeze to death. In theory, we do know that subjecting shrimp to cold ice or water reduces their activity, but it's not clear if this means they're stunned and no longer experiencing pain. They might just be paralyzed, feeling pain but unable to move. It's entirely possible that the shrimp in the slurry are freezing to death slowly and feeling the entire thing. But some shrimp don't go in the slurry. They're transported alive. So what about them? Shrimp Welfare Project found that many of those end up asphyxiated or crushed to death in crowded containers with just a small amount of water or ice. When Jimenezeria and his team investigated Indian shrimp farms, they found that 95% of the farmers they talked to believed the animals they tended could feel painful. When they saw the shrimp suffering, they would offer medicines or clean their water to make them feel better. One farmer said it was important to him to make the shrimp feel free. While there is less scientific evidence on the mental state of shrimp than that of other shellfish like, say, crabs, London School of Economics researchers have found evidence that backs these farmers up. The authors reported high confidence that Panaid shrimps, the kind of shrimp most people eat, have nociceptors or neurons that can respond to external stimuli that can hurt the shrimp. They also reviewed some studies showing that shrimp respond to painkillers by becoming calmer and grooming the hurt area on their bodies. Less more signs of shrimp's capacity to feel pain. The evidence is thin, the review concluded, but mostly because it's barely been researched. Whenever crustaceans have been closely examined by scientists, strong evidence of sentience is invariably found. In the end, the authors recommended that the British government treat all decapods, including shrimp, as sentient animals. So what do we do about it? Shrimp Welfare Project's suggestions are quite modest. They offer shrimp farms free electric stunning machines. Their theory is that being shocked to death by electricity has got to be less painful than being slowly frozen or crushed to death. But to get the stunning machines, farms have to do a couple other favors for the shrimp. They have to give each shrimp a minimum amount of space. The shrimp must have enough room to move around to burrow and to rest. Their water must be kept clean and free of noxious chemicals. And the shrimp have to come from hatcheries that do not practice ice stock ablation. That's when farmers take female shrimps and cut their eyes off without anesthetic. Hatcheries like this because it makes the shrimps lay slightly more eggs.