Brian Tomasik
Brian Tomasik is an American researcher, ethicist, and essayist. He is known for his work on wild animal suffering, suffering-focused ethics, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. He previously sometimes wrote under the name Alan Dawrst, a pseudonym he no longer uses. A proponent of consent-based negative utilitarianism, he has written extensively on the welfare and moral consideration of invertebrates such as insects, as well as on artificial sentience and reinforcement learning agents. He co-founded the non-profit Center on Long-Term Risk and is affiliated with the effective altruism movement. He is the creator of the website Essays on Reducing Suffering, on which he has published over a hundred essays on ethics, consciousness, and strategies for reducing suffering in biological and artificial systems.
Tomasik's 2009 essay "The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering" has been cited in discussions of the topic and as an early contribution to efforts to present it as a significant moral issue. He supports interventions aimed at reducing suffering in nature, including habitat destruction and gene editing, while warning about suffering risks posed by technologies such as terraforming, directed panspermia, and large-scale computer simulations. He argues against entomophagy and the consumption of bivalves, citing concerns about potential suffering and the large numbers of animals involved. Tomasik advocates evidence-based reasoning, cost-effectiveness, and long-term impact in ethical decision-making. In his writings on consciousness, he treats it as a constructed and morally relevant concept, rejecting metaphysical notions such as qualia and the hard problem of consciousness.
Education and career
Ethical development
Health and philosophical interests
As a teenager, Tomasik experienced chronic esophagitis, which he described as causing severe pain and sensitizing him to the intensity and prevalence of suffering.Tomasik attended Guilderland Central High School in Guilderland, New York from 2001 to 2005. While there, he began writing philosophical essays and continued independently after being introduced to Western philosophy in 2003. Influenced by Ralph Nader and Peter Singer, he adopted a utilitarian perspective in 2005. That same year, he encountered the issue of wild animal suffering in Singer's work and began to question whether life in nature yields more suffering than happiness. Influenced by thinkers such as Singer, Bernard Rollin, Yew-Kwang Ng, and David Pearce, he came to regard the suffering of wild animals, especially insects, as a major ethical concern, which he explored in early essays.
Altruism and earning to give
Around 2005, Tomasik began thinking seriously about valuing money from an altruistic perspective, influenced by claims that small donations could save lives through global health interventions. He also considered the concept of "replaceability", that taking a job in the non-profit sector might displace someone equally capable but less motivated to reduce suffering. His family encouraged him to consider a career in the non-profit sector or in policy analysis, but these reflections led him to explore the strategy of earning to give—pursuing a lucrative career and donating a substantial portion of your income. He discussed the idea with peers and articulated it in an editorial for his school newspaper.Although the basic idea had earlier been proposed by Peter Unger, Tomasik is credited with introducing it to the utilitarian forum Felicifia, of which he was a prominent member, where it helped shape discussions that later influenced the early development of the effective altruism movement.
University education and research
Tomasik majored in computer science and minored in mathematics and statistics at Swarthmore College from 2005 to 2009, receiving a B.A. in computer science in May 2009. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, and received several academic scholarships and awards. His coursework included subjects such as probability, statistics, machine learning, information retrieval, and mathematical finance.His academic and professional work has included research in machine learning, natural language processing, and economics. He has published on topics such as multitask feature selection, semantic music discovery, and image classification, and developed a Python module for lexical distributional similarity. He also 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 practiced the strategy of earning to give while working at Microsoft, in the Core Ranking division of Bing, the company's search engine, applying statistics and machine learning to improve the relevance of algorithmic search results. He donated a substantial portion of his income to charities, particularly those focused on animal welfare and vegan advocacy, including The Humane League and Vegan Outreach. He also leveraged Microsoft's matching contributions program, which doubled donations to tax-deductible charities up to $12,000 per year, allowing him to increase the impact of his giving. As of 2019, he had donated over $200,000.In 2013, he left Microsoft to focus on research aimed at reducing suffering. He co-founded the non-profit Center on Long-Term Risk to investigate cause prioritization and ethical challenges from a long-term perspective. He said he chose to focus on direct research contributions rather than delegating work to others because he believed his ethical views made his own contributions more valuable.
He has served as an advisor to the Center on Long-Term Risk and the Center for Reducing Suffering, and served on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators from 2012 to 2015.
Other roles
In 2015, Tomasik worked at FlyHomes as a software engineer, where he developed valuation models and data pipelines.''Essays on Reducing Suffering''
Origins
Tomasik has described compiling and circulating a collection of journal entries in 2005–2006. After corresponding with David Pearce in 2006, Pearce encouraged him to create a website and reserved the domain utilitarian-essays.com; Tomasik then learned HTML and converted his essays from LaTeX into web pages. In 2006, Tomasik launched the website as Utilitarian Essays, later renamed Essays on Reducing Suffering in 2008 to reflect his growing focus on suffering-focused ethics. He initially published the site under the pseudonym Alan Dawrst.Content
The site contains over a hundred essays on topics including ethics, consciousness, AI, wild animal suffering, and related subjects, and also includes interviews, donation recommendations, and contributions by other authors. Essays from the site have been cited in academic literature.Later updates
Tomasik migrated the site to WordPress in 2014 and changed the domain to reducing-suffering.org. He later moved away from WordPress and returned to maintaining the site by hand, completing the migration in January 2019.Tomasik has said that he publishes less frequently than in earlier years, citing higher standards for accuracy, overlap between his work and the broader effective altruism movement, changing personal priorities, and the prospect that generative artificial intelligence systems could produce a large volume of comparable writing and other content, which he said reduced his motivation to preserve or create his own work.
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 is an advocate of negative utilitarianism. He supports a form of threshold negative utilitarianism grounded in the principle of consent. According to this view, some forms of suffering are so intense that they cannot be morally outweighed by happiness. To identify this threshold, Tomasik proposes considering whether the individual experiencing the suffering would consent to keep experiencing it in exchange for future benefit. If consent is withdrawn during the experience, the suffering is deemed to have exceeded the moral threshold and should not be justified.He contrasts this view with what he terms "consent-based positive utilitarianism", which would permit severe suffering if offset by sufficient happiness. While Tomasik acknowledges the coherence of that view, he favors the negative utilitarian framework, which he considers more consistent with his emotional intuitions about the moral urgency of preventing suffering.
Tomasik also questions the moral significance of creating new happy beings, arguing that nonexistence is not inherently bad and that the drive to maximize happiness may reflect ideological bias. He characterizes his focus on reducing suffering as stemming from subjective intuition and acknowledges that moral values ultimately vary among individuals.