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PhilGoetz comments on Ethics has Evidence Too - Less Wrong
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Yes, this is one of the big questions. In Eliezer's scope insensitivity post, he implied that goodness is proportional to absolute number. But Eliezer has also said that he is an average utilitarian. So actually he should see what he called "scope insensitivity" as pretty near the right thing to do. If someone has no idea how many migrating birds there are, and you ask them, "How much would you pay to save 2000 birds?", they're going to seize on 2000 as a cue to indicate how many migrating birds there are. It might seem perfectly reasonable to such a person to suppose there are about 10,000 migrating birds total. But if you asked them, "How much would you pay to save 200,000 migrating birds?" they might suppose there are about 1,000,000 migrating birds. If they value their results by the average good done per bird existing, it would be correct for them to be willing to pay the same amount in both cases.
So what you're asking amounts to asking questions like whether you want to maximize average utility, total utility, or maximum utility.
Average utilitarianism over the entirety of Reality looks mostly like aggregative utilitarianism locally.
I don't think that most people average over all reality. We treated the last 3,000 wolves in North America with much more consideration than we treated the initial 30,000,000 wolves in North America. It's as if we have a budget per-species; as if we partition reality before applying our utility function.
(People like to partition their utility function, because they don't like to confront questions like, "How many beavers are worth a human's life?", or, "How many lattes would you give up to feed a person in Haiti for a week?")
Treating rare animals as especially valuable could be a result of having a (partitioned) utility function that discounts large numbers of individuals. Or it could have to do with valuing the information that will be lost if they go extinct. I don't know how to disentangle those things.