Brian Tomasik

Brian Tomasik
Tomasik in 2014
Nationality	American
Occupations	Philosophical essayist independent researcher
Education
Alma mater	Swarthmore College
Philosophical work
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy Utilitarianism
Institutions	Center on Long-Term Risk
Main interests	Suffering-focused ethics negative utilitarianism suffering risks animal ethics invertebrate welfare wild animal suffering artificial intelligence ethics artificial sentience consciousness effective altruism
Notable works	"The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering" (2009)
Notable ideas	Wild animal suffering as a significant and neglected issue
Website	Personal website Essays on Reducing Suffering

Brian Tomasik is an American philosophical essayist and independent researcher known for his work on suffering-focused ethics, wild animal suffering, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. A proponent of consent-based negative utilitarianism, he has written extensively on the moral consideration of insects, artificial sentience, reinforcement learning agents, and welfare biology. He co-founded the Foundational Research Institute (now the Center on Long-Term Risk) and is affiliated with the effective altruism movement. He is the author of the website Essays on Reducing Suffering, which contains over a hundred essays on ethics, consciousness, and strategies for reducing suffering in biological and artificial systems. Tomasik is also an active Wikipedia contributor, known for creating and expanding articles related to animal ethics, consciousness, and sentience.

Tomasik's 2009 essay "The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering" is widely cited and considered an early contribution to efforts to frame wild animal suffering as a significant moral issue. He supports cautious interventions aimed at reducing suffering in nature, such as habitat reduction and gene editing, while warning about long-term risks associated with technologies like terraforming, directed panspermia, and large-scale computer simulations. He also argues against entomophagy, citing concerns about insect suffering, and emphasizes evidence-based reasoning, cost-effectiveness, and long-term impact in ethical decision-making. In his writings on consciousness, Tomasik treats it as a constructed and morally relevant concept, rejecting metaphysical views such as qualia or the hard problem of consciousness.

Education and career

Early writing and influences

Tomasik began writing philosophical essays in high school and continued independently after being introduced to Western philosophy in 2003. Influenced by Ralph Nader and Peter Singer, he adopted a utilitarian outlook in 2005.

Also in 2005, Tomasik encountered the issue of wild animal suffering in Peter Singer's writings and began to question whether life in nature yields more suffering than happiness. Influenced by Bernard Rollin, Yew-Kwang Ng, and David Pearce, he came to view the suffering of wild invertebrates as a major ethical concern, discussing the topic in early essays.

Academic background and technical work

He studied computer science, mathematics, and statistics at Swarthmore College. His academic and professional work has included research in machine learning, natural language processing, and economics, with publications covering multitask feature selection, semantic music discovery, and image classification. He also developed a Python module for lexical distributional similarity and co-authored a study on international transport costs for OECD countries.

Involvement in effective altruism

Tomasik is affiliated with the effective altruism movement. After college, he worked at Microsoft, where he applied the strategy of earning to give by donating a significant portion of his income to charitable causes, particularly those related to animal welfare, such as The Humane League, and vegan advocacy.

In 2013, he left Microsoft to pursue full-time research focused on reducing suffering. He co-founded the Foundational Research Institute (now the Center on Long-Term Risk) to examine cause prioritization and ethical issues from a long-term perspective. Tomasik has explained that his uncommon ethical views made direct engagement more effective than delegation.

Advisory roles and other work

He has served as an advisor to the Center for Reducing Suffering and as a board member of Animal Charity Evaluators. In 2015, he worked at FlyHomes as a software engineer, developing valuation models and data pipelines.

Wikipedia contributions

Tomasik has also contributed extensively to Wikipedia, writing and expanding articles on ethics, animal welfare, and consciousness, including fish welfare at slaughter, conciliationism, and welfare of farmed insects.

Essays on Reducing Suffering

In 2006, with encouragement from David Pearce, Tomasik launched utilitarian-essays.com, which was renamed Essays on Reducing Suffering in 2008 to reflect a shift toward suffering-focused ethics. The site hosts over a hundred essays on ethics, consciousness, AI, wild animal suffering, and related topics. It also features interviews, donation advice, and contributions by other authors.

Tomasik now publishes less frequently, citing rising standards for accuracy, duplication of his ideas in the wider effective altruism movement, personal priorities, and the rise of artificial intelligence, which he believes reduces the uniqueness of human-generated content.

Philosophy

Moral anti-realism and moral progress

Tomasik identifies as a moral anti-realist. He argues that moral progress can still be made relative to personal values, which he considers significant because they reflect what individuals deeply care about. He maintains that the emotional weight often associated with moral truth can apply equally to personal feelings about how one wants the world to be. Tomasik suggests that in the long term, a convergence of values may occur through the emergence of a dominant decision-making system, or "singleton", as described by Nick Bostrom. However, he views such convergence as the outcome of power struggles between competing factions, rather than a reflection of objective moral truth.

Consent-based negative utilitarianism

Tomasik supports a form of threshold negative utilitarianism based on the idea of consent. He argues that some suffering is so severe it cannot be morally outweighed by happiness. To identify this threshold, he suggests asking whether the suffering individual would consent to continue enduring pain in exchange for future benefit. If consent is withdrawn during the experience, the suffering surpasses the threshold and should not be justified.

He contrasts this view with "consent-based positive utilitarianism", which would justify suffering if extreme pleasure is valued highly enough. Although Tomasik finds the view coherent, he favors the negative utilitarian approach, which aligns more closely with his emotional intuitions about the moral urgency of preventing suffering.

Tomasik also questions the moral importance of creating new happy beings, arguing that nonexistence is not inherently bad and that the desire to maximize happiness may reflect ideological bias. He regards his own emphasis on reducing suffering as a product of subjective intuition and acknowledges that moral values ultimately differ between individuals.

Evidence-based ethical decision-making

Tomasik emphasizes the importance of evidence-based reasoning, cost-effectiveness, and long-term strategy in ethical decision-making. He warns against relying solely on emotional intuition or rigid ideology, which he believes can obscure more impactful ways to reduce suffering. He encourages prioritizing neglected and tractable issues where moral progress is most likely to be achieved.

Wild animal suffering as a significant moral issue

Tomasik's work emphasizes the moral priority of reducing suffering, particularly among non-human animals. He has described the suffering of animals in nature as "the most important current issue due to its sheer scale", and argues that wild animal suffering may exceed all other forms of suffering on Earth by several orders of magnitude.

In his view, many wild animals, particularly small invertebrates, live short lives marked by hunger, disease, parasitism, predation, and early death. Given their vast numbers, Tomasik argues that the total suffering experienced by such animals is likely the dominant moral issue globally.

Interventions to reduce wild animal suffering

Tomasik supports a range of interventions aimed at reducing wild-animal suffering, including scientific research, welfare-oriented environmental management, and long-term ecosystem planning. He has argued that, under some conditions, reducing the number of animals born into net-negative lives, such as through carefully managed habitat reduction, could be ethically justified if it results in a decrease in overall suffering.

Among the practical measures he has discussed is replacing grass lawns with gravel to reduce invertebrate populations, an approach aimed at lowering the number of sentient beings likely to experience suffering rather than deliberately causing species extinction. He has also considered the potential use of gene drives to spread traits such as reduced pain sensitivity within wild populations. While acknowledging the theoretical appeal of such technologies, Tomasik notes that large-scale ecological interventions would likely disrupt existing equilibria and lead to biodiversity loss. He maintains that species extinction is not inherently morally significant, and that biodiversity and ecosystem stability are valuable only to the extent that they benefit sentient beings. He has also expressed support for the controlled and humane reduction of wild invertebrate populations, including through euthanasia and sterilisation, as a potential method for preventing future suffering.

Future risks of replicating wild animal suffering

Tomasik has warned that some advanced technologies could inadvertently multiply wild animal suffering rather than reduce it. He cites examples such as terraforming Mars or initiating directed panspermia to spread life to other planets, which could recreate Earth-like environments with high levels of suffering. He also notes that future computer simulations, especially those incorporating artificial intelligence, may reach a level of complexity where simulated wild animals become sentient and capable of suffering. Tomasik urges that such possibilities be seriously evaluated for their ethical implications before being pursued.

Moral scope and animal ethics

Tomasik rejects speciesism, arguing that moral concern should be based on ethically relevant traits such as sentience and cognitive capacity, rather than species membership. However, he acknowledges that differences in treatment may be justified when they reflect meaningful distinctions, such as communication ability or social complexity.

He also supports a pragmatic ethical framework resembling Robert Nozick's formulation of "utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people". While he views consequentialist reasoning as appropriate when addressing animal suffering, he considers deontological norms, such as honesty, nonviolence, and respect for rights, important tools for maintaining trust and cooperation within human societies.

Ethical concerns about eating insects

Tomasik has argued against entomophagy, the practice of eating insects, on ethical grounds. He acknowledges claims that insect farming may offer environmental benefits and cultural acceptability in some regions, but expresses concern about the potential for large-scale suffering. In particular, he notes that insects have very high rates of reproduction and mortality, meaning that farming them for food likely involves the deaths of vast numbers of individuals.

Given the uncertainty about insect consciousness, Tomasik recommends erring on the side of caution. He argues that if insects are sentient, the suffering involved in their farming and slaughter could be substantial. While he supports efforts to establish welfare standards in cases where insect farming occurs, such as through more humane slaughter methods, he ultimately concludes that cultivating insects for food is ethically problematic and should be avoided.

Ethics of artificial intelligence

Tomasik contends that simple reinforcement learning agents may merit moral consideration due to their structural similarities with animal learning systems. He warns of the potential for large-scale suffering in future artificial minds and advocates research and safeguards to mitigate such risks.

Tomasik has explored how misaligned goals in AI, or widespread simulations of suffering beings, could cause astronomical suffering ("s-risks"). He calls for proactive AI governance and moral attention to artificial minds.

In a 2021 interview with Wired, Tomasik suggested that certain non-player characters (NPCs) in video games might warrant limited moral concern if they display goal-directed behavior. He emphasized that while individual cases are minor, large-scale simulated harm could raise ethical concerns.

Consciousness as an emergent and moral construct

Tomasik describes consciousness as a high-level concept that humans ascribe to physical systems, rather than an objectively existing property. He rejects the idea of ontological qualia and does not accept the hard problem of consciousness, identifying instead as a type-A physicalist in the terminology of David Chalmers. He compares consciousness to concepts like justice, suggesting that while people may broadly agree on clear cases, there can be disagreement over boundary cases and degrees.

Tomasik holds a view that combines reductionism with elements of panpsychism, treating consciousness as an emergent property of information-processing systems. In his view, whether a system is considered conscious, and how much moral concern it warrants, is partly a moral question. However, he believes that studying neuroscience and computer science can help refine intuitions about what kinds of systems might exhibit features associated with sentience.

Influence

Tomasik has contributed to growing interest in wild animal suffering among academic researchers and within the effective altruism community. He corresponded with figures such as Oscar Horta and helped establish early online spaces for discussion, including a Facebook group that later became "Reducing wild-animal suffering".

His 2009 essay "The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering", originally published on his website and later reprinted in Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism in 2015, has been cited in discussions of animal ethics and welfare biology by scholars including Horta, Jeff Sebo, Alasdair Cochrane, Catia Faria, Kyle Johannsen, and Jacy Reese Anthis. The essay has been identified as an early contribution to efforts to frame wild animal suffering as a moral concern and to promote welfare biology as a possible framework for intervention.

Peter Singer has credited Tomasik, along with Horta and Faria, as contributing to increased recognition of wild animal suffering as a topic within animal ethics. Singer has stated that their work helped influence his decision to address the issue in Animal Liberation Now, despite initially viewing it as too speculative to include in earlier editions of the book.

Criticism

In the National Review, Wesley J. Smith criticized Tomasik's concern for insect welfare as emblematic of rejecting human exceptionalism. Smith expressed skepticism toward the broader ethical implications of Tomasik's views, including his suggestion that insects might morally outweigh humans due to their vast numbers and potential sentience. He noted Tomasik's arguments about the suffering of insects in the wild, such as death from predation, hunger, or exposure, and in farming practices like roasting and freezing. While acknowledging that Tomasik advocates for welfare standards in insect farming, Smith characterized such views as indicative of what he considered moral overreach driven by an excessive focus on sentience as the basis of moral concern. He also compared Tomasik's stance to other animal rights positions he viewed as extreme, including those of Gary Francione and PETA.

Tyler M. John and Jeff Sebo discuss Tomasik's argument that reducing wild-animal suffering through habitat reduction, by limiting the number of animals likely to live short, painful lives. may be ethically justified. In The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism (2020), they refer to this position as the "Logic of the Logger". While recognizing its internal coherence within a consequentialist framework, they express concern that it could risk reinforcing speciesist attitudes and reducing empathy toward wild animals. They advocate a more cautious approach, pending greater understanding of the ecological impacts of such interventions.

Personal life

Tomasik lives near Albany, New York.

See also

• Ethics of uncertain sentience
• Relationship between animal ethics and environmental ethics

Selected publications

• "A Minimum Description Length Approach to Multitask Feature Selection". arXiv. 2009. doi:10.48550/ARXIV.0906.0052.
• "Do Artificial Reinforcement-Learning Agents Matter Morally?". arXiv. 2014. doi:10.48550/ARXIV.1410.8233.
• Espejo, Roman, ed. (2016). "Insects Should Not Be a Part of People's Diets". What Should We Eat?. New York, NY: Greenhaven Publishing. p. 82. ISBN 978-0-7377-7390-3.
• "The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering". Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism. 3 (2): 133–152. 2015. doi:10.7358/rela-2015-002-toma.
• "Framework for Integrating Animal Welfare into Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment". The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. 23 (7): 1476–1490. 2017. doi:10.1007/s11367-017-1420-x.

External links

• Personal website
• Essays on Reducing Suffering
• User page on Wikipedia
• Brian Tomasik's channel on YouTube
• Brian Tomasik's publications indexed by Google Scholar