Brian Tomasik

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 meaningful because they reflect what individuals care about. He maintains that the emotional force often associated with moral truth can also apply to personal feelings about how one wants the world to be. Tomasik suggests that, in the long term, some convergence of values may occur through the emergence of a dominant decision-making system, or "singleton", as described by Nick Bostrom. He views such convergence as the result of power relations between competing factions rather than evidence of objective moral truth.^[14]

Consent-based negative utilitarianism

Tomasik is an advocate of negative utilitarianism.^[15] He supports a form of threshold negative utilitarianism based on 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 If consent is withdrawn during the experience, the suffering is deemed to have exceeded the moral threshold and should not be justified.^[16]

He contrasts this view with what he calls "consent-based positive utilitarianism", which would permit severe suffering if offset by sufficient happiness. Tomasik acknowledges the coherence of that view, but favours the negative utilitarian framework, which he regards as closer to his intuitions about the moral urgency of preventing suffering.^[16]

Tomasik also questions the moral value 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 based on subjective intuition and acknowledges that moral values vary among individuals.^[16]

Evidence-based ethical decision-making

Tomasik has argued for evidence-based reasoning, cost-effectiveness, and long-term strategy in ethical decision-making. He contends that emotional intuition and rigid ideology can obstruct more effective ways to reduce suffering, and has recommended focusing on neglected and tractable issues.^[14][17]

Wild animal suffering

Tomasik's work centres on the reduction of suffering, including suffering among non-human animals.^[17] 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.^[8]

According to Tomasik, many wild animals, particularly small invertebrates, live short lives marked by hunger, disease, parasitism, predation, and early death. Given their numbers, he contends that their cumulative suffering may be among the largest sources of suffering on Earth.^[17][18]

Animal welfare assessment

Tomasik co-authored the 2017 paper "Framework for Integrating Animal Welfare into Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment", published in The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. The study proposed three indicators for evaluating animal welfare based on life quality, lifespan, and the number of animals required per unit of food. One indicator also incorporated cognitive traits such as intelligence. The study found that insect-based foods scored worst across all indicators because of high mortality and low yield, despite lower assumed sentience. The authors argued that simplified welfare metrics can be incorporated into sustainability assessments.^[23]

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. He also states that differences in treatment may be justified when they reflect relevant distinctions, such as communication ability or social complexity.^[17]

He supports a pragmatic ethical framework resembling Robert Nozick's formulation of "utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people".^[17] While he views consequentialist reasoning as appropriate when addressing animal suffering, he considers deontological norms, such as honesty, nonviolence, and respect for rights, tools for maintaining trust and cooperation within human societies.^[17]

Ethics of artificial intelligence

Tomasik has written about the moral status of artificial minds, especially those built using reinforcement learning and related techniques. He argues that even simple artificial agents may warrant moral consideration because of structural similarities with animal learning systems.^[27]

Consciousness

Tomasik has been described as endorsing a form of consciousness eliminativism, the view that consciousness does not exist as an ontologically distinct entity.^[31] He describes consciousness as a high-level concept that humans ascribe to physical systems, rather than an objectively existing property. He rejects the existence 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 such as justice: socially constructed, morally relevant, and vague at the margins. In his view, people may agree on clear cases while differing about borderline instances.^[14]

Tomasik combines reductionism with elements of panpsychism, treating consciousness as an emergent property of information-processing systems. He argues that whether a system is considered conscious, and the moral concern it warrants, is partly a normative question. He also supports using neuroscience and computer science to refine judgements about which systems are more likely to exhibit sentience.^[14]

Wild animal suffering

Tomasik has contributed to 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".^[7]

His 2009 essay "The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering", originally published on his website and later reprinted by the Center on Long-Term Risk and in the journal Relations. Beyond Anthropocentrism in 2015,^[18][32] 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.^[33] A 2016 research plan by the Foundational Research Institute described the essay as an early contribution to work presenting wild animal suffering as a moral concern and welfare biology as a possible framework for intervention.^[34]

Tomasik's 2009 essay "How Many Wild Animals Are There?" has also been cited in academic literature on the scale of wild animal populations and their ethical relevance, particularly within debates on wild animal suffering, welfare biology, and longtermist ethics.^[35]

Peter Singer has credited Tomasik, along with Oscar Horta and Catia Faria, with helping to establish wild animal suffering as a topic within animal ethics. Singer said their work influenced his decision to include the subject in Animal Liberation Now, after he had considered it too speculative to address in earlier editions of the book.^[36] Singer also cited Tomasik and Horta in his 2015 book on effective altruism, The Most Good You Can Do.^[37]

Insect welfare and human exceptionalism

In a 2014 article for National Review, Wesley J. Smith criticized Tomasik's concern for insect welfare as an example of rejecting human exceptionalism. Smith questioned the implications of prioritizing the potential suffering of insects, particularly in comparison with human interests, and expressed skepticism about proposals to reduce insect populations on moral grounds. He also cited Tomasik's suggestions for insect farming standards and concern over insect deaths in nature as examples of what he viewed as an excessive focus on sentience as the basis of moral concern.^[38]

Habitat destruction

Philosopher Kyle Johannsen has criticized Tomasik's argument that intentional habitat destruction could be justified as a way to reduce wild animal suffering, particularly among r-strategist species. While acknowledging that such measures might reduce total suffering, Johannsen argues that Tomasik's position depends on a utilitarian framework that gives less weight to moral constraints against directly causing harm. From a moderate deontological perspective, Johannsen contends that negative duties, such as the duty not to kill or displace animals, are more stringent than positive duties to prevent suffering. He concludes that intentional habitat destruction is morally impermissible even if it would improve net outcomes, and instead supports cautious, harm-avoiding interventions in nature.^[39]

In The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism, philosophers Tyler M. John and Jeff Sebo describe Tomasik's view as exemplifying the "Logic of the Logger".^[40] While recognizing the coherence of this position within consequentialism, they caution that it could unintentionally justify ecologically harmful actions and reduce empathy toward wild animals. They recommend a more cautious ethical stance, based on further empirical study of ecological systems, before endorsing large interventions based on such reasoning.^[40]