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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Ethics has Evidence Too - Less Wrong
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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.