Beyond the 3 Rs to a More Comprehensive Framework of Principles for Animal Research Ethics

We have produced a framework of general moral principles for animal research ethics in a book, Principles of Animal Research Ethics, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in fall 2019. This book includes a detailed statement and defense of our framework along with critical commentaries on our work from seven eminent scholars: Larry Carbone, Frans de Waal, Rebecca Dresser, Joseph Garner, Brian Hare, Margaret Landi, and Julian Savulescu. In the present paper, we explain the motivation for our project and present our framework of principles. The first section explains why a new framework is both needed and timely, on the basis of six important developments in recent decades. The second section challenges assertions of an unbridgeable gulf dividing the animal-research and animal-protection communities on the issue of animal research. It does so, first, by indicating common ground in the core values of social benefit and animal welfare and, then, by presenting and briefly defending our framework: three principles of social benefit and three principles of animal welfare. These six principles, we argue, constitute a more suitable framework than any other that is currently available, including the canonical 3 Rs advanced in 1959 by William M. S. Russell and Rex L. Burch.