Constitutive Heterogeneity in Ethical Inquiry: A Conditional Framework for Standing, Partial Translation, and Effective Answerability

Ethical inquiry across differently constituted beings faces a compound difficulty. Perception, embodiment, valence, agency, temporality, communication, vulnerability, and developmental history can differ together. The observer also participates in producing the evidence through experimental design, care, confinement, training, translation, and institutional classification. A familiar response can invite projection, while an unfamiliar response can invite premature exclusion. This position paper develops a conditional framework for this problem. Its primary empirical domain is nonhuman-animal inquiry. Hypothetical extraterrestrial first contact functions as a bounded stress test for radical underidentification. The framework defines constitutive heterogeneity as a target-, direction-, relation-, evidence-, and inquiry-indexed condition. It then separates six warrants: subject characterization, partial translation, standing, response interpretation, effective answerability, and substantive ethical judgment. A four-valued evidence register preserves support, counter-support, unresolved status, and inapplicability. The formal analysis yields several limited results. Exact translation and moral standing are logically independent inside the model. Identical response distributions can coexist with divergent latent valence models. A controlled response can be detected while its communicative meaning remains unresolved. A simple asymmetric-error rule gives a precautionary threshold only under calibrated probabilities and commensurable complete losses. A weaker low-burden dominance rule excludes inquiry policies with weakly lower epistemic gain and weakly greater burdens on every declared coordinate. Effective answerability is represented through entry, legibility, safety, timing, effect, correction, succession, and protected opacity. The paper connects this architecture to work on animal perceptual worlds, subjective access, comparative cognition, sentience, welfare, capability, relational and political animal ethics, multispecies inquiry, opacity, moral status beyond Earth, and planetary protection. The resulting proposal is a revisable research programme. Species-specific evidence, bridge comparison, institutional design, and empirical tests of low-burden response channels remain central future tasks.