Brian Tomasik: Suffering-Focused Ethics and Effective Altruism

Brian Tomasik is a writer and researcher whose work has significantly influenced how many people in the effective altruism community think about ethics, animal welfare, and the long-term future. His essays and organizational work emphasize a central idea: that reducing suffering, for both humans and nonhumans, should be a primary moral priority.

Who Is Brian Tomasik?

Brian Tomasik is an American researcher known for his website Essays on Reducing Suffering, where he explores topics such as animal ethics, consciousness, and the far future.

• Academic background: Studied computer science, mathematics, and statistics at Swarthmore College.
• Industry experience: Worked as a software development engineer and later as a data scientist at technology companies including Microsoft.
• Nonprofit work: Co-founded the Foundational Research Institute (now the Center on Long-Term Risk), focusing on long-run suffering risks.
• Writing impact: Authored over a hundred essays that are widely referenced in discussions on effective altruism, wild-animal welfare, and longtermism.

Through this combination of technical training, practical experience, and philosophical writing, Tomasik has helped bridge abstract ethical questions with concrete decisions about careers, donations, and activism.

Suffering-Focused Ethics in Plain Language

Tomasik is often described as a suffering-focused or negative-leaning utilitarian, meaning he gives special weight to the reduction of suffering relative to the creation of additional happiness.

While many ethical theories balance both benefits and harms, suffering-focused views argue that avoiding extreme suffering is morally more urgent than creating extra well-being for those already doing reasonably well. This perspective is related to broader discussions in moral philosophy about the asymmetry between harms and benefits.

Some themes in his work include:

• Moral circle expansion: Extending serious ethical concern to all sentient beings, including nonhuman animals and potentially digital minds.
• Attention to neglected suffering: Highlighting forms of suffering that are massive in scale but often overlooked, such as wild-animal suffering and long-term risks of astronomical suffering.
• Quantitative thinking: Using approximate numbers, probabilities, and comparisons to prioritize where a marginal unit of effort can reduce the most expected suffering.

From Personal Interest to Effective Altruism

Tomasik’s trajectory mirrors the broader development of the effective altruism (EA) movement. In its early days, EA was largely driven by online discussions among a small group of utilitarian-minded thinkers.

Over time, he moved from informal web essays to contributing to more organized projects, including:

• Helping to shape early discussions on earning to give, the idea of choosing a high-earning career primarily to donate more to effective charities.
• Assisting with the early development of organizations focused on animal advocacy and charity evaluation.
• Co-founding an institute dedicated to exploring how our actions today influence suffering in the far future.

This shift reflects a wider trend: as EA matured and became more professional, work that had once been done by volunteers on forums transitioned into full-time research roles, grantmaking, and institution building.

Wild-Animal Welfare: A Neglected Frontier

One of Tomasik’s most distinctive contributions is helping to establish wild-animal welfare as a serious topic for research and advocacy.

Traditional animal advocacy has often focused on farmed animals, companion animals, and animals used in research. Tomasik argued that this picture is incomplete, because the majority of vertebrate animals—and a vast number of invertebrates—live in the wild, where they experience disease, hunger, predation, and other forms of suffering.

Why Wild-Animal Suffering Matters

• Scale: Ecologists estimate that wild animal populations number in the trillions, especially when considering small vertebrates and invertebrates.
• Life histories: Many species produce huge numbers of offspring, most of whom die young, often in painful ways.
• Neglect: Conservation efforts typically prioritize ecosystem stability or species preservation, not the individual welfare of animals within those systems.

By bringing attention to these issues, Tomasik encouraged researchers and advocates to ask new questions:

• How do existing environmental policies affect the well-being of wild animals?
• When might human interventions reduce or increase net suffering in nature?
• What long-term trajectories of civilization lead to less expected suffering for wild and artificial beings?

Earning to Give and Career Strategy

Tomasik was among the earliest authors in EA circles to explicitly articulate the argument for earning to give—choosing a high-income career with the intention of donating a substantial portion of earnings to highly effective charities.

His early writings encouraged people to think explicitly about replaceability in careers: if you do not take a given role, would someone nearly as qualified fill it? If so, the marginal value of you personally taking that position may be lower than it first appears, which can shift the calculation in favor of earning to give or other types of work.

Building Institutions to Reduce Suffering

In addition to writing, Tomasik has helped create and advise organizations that aim to reduce suffering more systematically.

• Foundational Research Institute / Center on Long-Term Risk: A research group examining how current decisions influence the risk of very large-scale suffering in the future, including scenarios involving advanced AI or other transformative technologies.
• Animal-focused charities: Advisory and board roles in organizations evaluating animal charities and promoting effective animal advocacy.
• Grantmaking and strategy: Shifting from public essay writing toward higher-level input on grant decisions and organizational strategy as the EA community professionalized.

This institutional work reflects an important insight: to significantly reduce suffering at scale, individuals often need to support or build systems—research organizations, funding bodies, and advocacy groups—that persist and grow beyond any single person’s direct efforts.

Donations and Cause Prioritization

Tomasik has donated substantial personal income to what he sees as high-leverage opportunities to reduce suffering.

His donation choices over time illustrate several broader principles of effective altruism:

• Cause neutrality: Start from a broad set of possibilities—global health, animal welfare, existential and suffering risks—and compare them using consistent criteria such as scale, neglectedness, and tractability.
• Updating beliefs: Reassess donation targets as new information emerges about organizational performance, room for more funding, or neglected problem areas.
• Long-term focus: Support not only near-term interventions but also research that may improve our ability to reduce suffering in the distant future.

His public discussion of donation strategies has contributed to ongoing debates about how to balance immediate impact (for example, improving global health) with measures meant to safeguard or improve the long-term future.

Writing Less in a More Mature Movement

In later years, Tomasik has written about why he now publishes fewer public essays, despite still caring deeply about suffering reduction.

Some of the reasons he gives include:

• Professionalization of EA: As more full-time researchers, grantmakers, and institutions emerged, it often became more impactful for him to give targeted advice than to write general articles.
• Higher standards: With more existing literature and more at stake, his bar for publishing new work rose, leading to fewer but more carefully considered pieces.
• Shifting comparative advantage: Other people began covering introductory topics, freeing him to focus on more specialized strategy and mentoring.

This evolution highlights a broader lesson for impact-focused careers: as a field grows, the best contribution for a given person may shift from broad public communication to more targeted, behind-the-scenes work.

Lessons for People Who Want to Reduce Suffering

For readers who share an interest in reducing suffering as effectively as possible, Tomasik’s work suggests several practical takeaways:

• Take the moral status of nonhumans seriously. Evidence suggests that many animals have the capacity to feel pain and distress, and major organizations now acknowledge animal sentience as ethically important.
• Look for neglected problems. Issues like wild-animal welfare and worst-case future suffering receive far less attention and funding than their scale might warrant.
• Consider both direct work and earning to give. Different people will have different comparative advantages; rigorous, honest reflection about skills and opportunities is crucial.
• Think long term. Decisions that affect emerging technologies, institutional norms, or value systems may influence the trajectory of suffering for extremely long time horizons.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: Does a suffering-focused view ignore happiness completely?

A: No. Suffering-focused ethics, as discussed in Tomasik’s work, emphasizes the moral urgency of reducing severe suffering rather than denying the value of happiness. It typically holds that preventing extreme suffering can be more important than creating additional happiness for those already doing relatively well.

Q: Why pay attention to animals in the wild if conservation already exists?

A: Conservation biology usually focuses on species survival and ecosystem health, not on the lived experiences of individual animals. Wild animals can face intense and widespread suffering from disease, predation, and starvation, and these welfare considerations are often missing from environmental decision-making.

Q: Is earning to give still recommended?

A: Earning to give remains one option among many. Following ideas Tomasik helped popularize, effective altruism now treats it as one possible high-impact path, to be weighed against direct work, research, and entrepreneurship depending on a person’s skills, values, and opportunities.

Q: How can someone start contributing to reducing suffering?

A: Common first steps include learning about the main cause areas in effective altruism, experimenting with donations to highly rated charities, exploring career paths with strong impact potential, and connecting with communities focused on animal welfare or longtermist issues.

Q: Is focusing on the far future speculative?

A: Work on the long-term future is necessarily uncertain, but many researchers argue that because the potential scale of future lives is enormous, even small chances of influencing long-run trajectories can have very large expected value. This argument is widely discussed in longtermist and suffering-focused research communities.

Written by

Medha Deb

Medha Deb is an editor with a master's degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Hyderabad. She believes that her qualification has helped her develop a deep understanding of language and its application in various contexts. Medha specializes in the areas of beauty, health, sports, and wellness and is committed to ensuring that the content on the website is…