Unexplainable - Consider the shrimp

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Killing two people is worse than killing one. What about 440 billion crustaceans? Adapted from Dylan Matthews's essay on Vox.com. This story is part of a series supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare. For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Defender. With a towing capacity of 3,500 kilograms and a waiting depth of 900 millimeters, the Defender 110 pushes what's possible. Learn more at landrover.ca. 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 philosophers. 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 back. 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 them David, needs five pills to survive. It just so happens you have exactly five pills. What should you do? Most people, Torric concedes, will conclude that dividing the drug supply five ways and 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 four.

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. It's not fair to David. Torek 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, Torek argues that the drug's owner should not just reflexively save the five 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 Torrick 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 Torrick's argument. that by the end of the essay he wrote in reply, he was sort of reduced to lecturing TORIC 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 not totally on board with Torek, at least Torek 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 of analytics, 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 certain, 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 233.

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 animals, 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 Torrick is a madman, and of course the numbers 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 Jimenezeria has walked down this road, at least a little ways. In 2020, he left a career in private equity to co-found Shrimp Welfare Project, which is exactly what it sounds like. When I asked Jimenez-Zaria 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 and his Zaria 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 him and Azaria and his team investigated Indian shrimp farms, they found that 95% of the farmers they talked to believed the animals they tended could feel pain. 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 Peneid shrimps, the kind of shrimp most people eat, have no susceptors 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 projects' 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. into 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 shrimp lay slightly more eggs. At the end of the day, shrimp welfare project is a tiny nonprofit.

They have about 10 full-time staff. And they're working to help hundreds of billions of animals die less painful deaths. They're not trying to bring down the entire multi-billion dollar shrimp industry. They're not even asking people to stop eating shrimp. So who could be mad about that? Many, many people, it turns out, can be mad about that. That's after the break.

It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in and your own security channel, at London Heathrow, you can glide from your car to their clubhouse, a destination in its own right in 10 minutes or less. On board, you can treat yourself to your own private suite to stretch out in,

with lots of storage space, a lie flat bed, and delicious dining from beginning to end. Just be sure to leave room for dessert. Their mile high tea with all the little cakes and sandwiches is a showstopper. Go to virginatlantic.com to learn more. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Therapeutic. tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs,

and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a Stead Herndon, and this is America actually. We're all talking to each to see what did we do wrong? What did we not see? I'm in Washington, D.C. this week to interview Ruben Gallego. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona, and he's been thinking openly about running for higher office, but he's recently run into some hot water because of his connection to Congressman Eric Swalwell. I have to learn from this, and I will learn from this. But, you know, for me, it's not a 2028 question. It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a senator to my constituents.

This week on America, actually, we asked Gallego about predatory behavior in Washington, his plans for immigration reform, and more. When the philosophy blogger Flo wrote a piece defending the importance of shrimp welfare, she was rewarded with some 1.4 million views of her ex post and a barrage of hate from enemies of the shrimp. Flo isn't an animal ethicist at all. She told me, I'd be so bored if I did that. It's like studying the ethics of punching random people in the face.

Just don't do it. The point of her post was to explore the idea of scope sensitivity. Scope sensitivity is roughly put, the ethical concept that it's sometimes a good idea to count stuff. Sometimes, as when reading John Torek, the importance of counting seems obvious. It matters whether it's one person or five. people who are at risk of dying. But especially when numbers reach into the millions and billions and trillions, our ability to intelligently compare starts to erode.

Maybe my favorite example is plastic straws. Over the last decade, huge amounts of global effort have gone into moving away from single-use plastic straws. My favorite coffee shop in Washington, D.C., has adopted this cardboard straw and it has all the tensile strength of a chocolate eclair. But even the most alarming estimates of plastic straw usage suggested that straws account for, at most, 0.03% of the plastic waste dumped into the world's oceans every year. By contrast, fishing nets make up 46% of the waste.

Focusing on plastic straws instead of on fishing nets, that's scope insensitivity. The casual dismissal of shrimp welfare struck flow as a similar kind of scope and sensitivity. The number of shrimp killed every year is about four times greater than the number of humans who have ever lived in human history. If you think the shrimp matter at all, even if you think shrimp matter only 1%, or 0.1% as much as people matter, these numbers should alarm you. The scope matters. Ronnie Chang, the Daily Show correspondent, once did a segment on shrimp welfare project, inspired by the furious substack debate over it.

He had penetrating questions for Jimenez Zaria. For example, is this a sex thing? But the most trenchant questions he saved for an animal activist criticizing the quantitative approach of the group. Please don't be offended by this, he said. Are you just saying this because you're bad at math? There are two layers to the negative reaction to shrimp welfare. One is, well, it's shrimp.

They're tiny. It's in the name. They look like gross ocean bugs. But the other layer is, I think, more fundamental. It's not about shrimp. It's about counting. Shrimp welfare project is the idea that the numbers ought to count taken to the absurd. Sure, you start with saving five humans rather than one, But once you get on that trolley, the last stop is the view that maybe you should save a billion shrimp instead of one human.

As I start to spiral out about this, about this choice between what seems like a kind of moral nihilism, where five lives don't count for more than just one, and a kind of shrimp fanaticism that obliges me to consign myself and my wife and child to monkish poverty so that we may serve the crustaceans who need us. I remember a man who takes neither of these positions. Andres Jimenez Zaria. He told me that he had tried to do this trolley exercise with his co-founder, where they compared the value of shrimps versus other animals or humans, and they dropped it five minutes in,

because it was, in his words, irrelevant. The point isn't whether shrimp are more important than humans, he said. The question is whether this thing is important enough. for some people to spend some time on. The answer for us was incontrovertibly yes. The public reaction to press coverage, like The Daily Show appearance, he said, was overwhelmingly positive.

People didn't fulminate about the evils of prioritizing shrimp lives over those of humans. They asked how they could know if the shrimp they're buying is ethically raised and slaughtered. They asked for information about shrimp consciousness and pain awareness. They donated to the shrimp.

money. Shrimp welfare project hasn't exactly taken over the shrimp industry, but it's making progress. They say they've worked with farms producing about 4 billion shrimp a year, or about 1% of all farmed shrimp. Humana Zaria expresses a worldview that I've come to appreciate. You could call it shrimp centrism. The numbers matter. John Torrick is wrong. But we are humans. We are often wrong. Our information is often imprecise. And certainly no one has enough information to conclude that shrimp welfare is the most important thing on earth. What we probably do have enough information to conclude is that shrimp matter, at least a bit. And maybe it's good that four billion of them a year get to die less painful deaths. This episode was written by me, Dylan Matthews.

Production help from Bird Pinkerton, Jorge Just, and Erica Huang. Editing from Bird and Jorge. With music, mixing and sound design from Erica Wong. Meredith Haudenot runs the show. Julia Longoria is our editorial director. As always, thank you to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show. If you have any thoughts about our show, please send us an email. We're at Unexplanable at Vox.com.

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