How to Give Ethical Input on Animal Research Transitions: Ideal and Nonideal Theory

Research that harms animals raises the question of whether and how science should be transformed over time. To helpfully address this issue, ethical guidance needs to be sensitive both to ideals and to real-world constraints. This paper provides a structured approach based on Rawls’s notions of ideal and nonideal theory. First, ideal animal research ethics needs to account for just relations between the polity, the scientific community, and animals, discounting non-compliance and unfavorable circumstances. Second, nonideal theory compares a particular context to the ideal, identifies key obstacles, formulates candidate policies, and evaluates those policies from moral, political, and practical perspectives. This approach has the practical advantage of providing ethical action-guidance in context. It also has the theoretical advantage of forcing us to make our normative and empirical assumptions explicit, which helps in improving arguments through debate and understanding entrenched disagreements.