Should Moral Repair Be Offered to Morally Injured Laboratory Animal Technicians?

Lab-technicians are at risk of sustaining moral injuries when complicit in unethical experiments. Prima facie, it would be puzzling to offer the perpetrator of an unethical experiment psychological support in the form of moral repair. However, we argue that lab technicians are owed moral repair as a special case of our proposed duty of special concern. The duty of special concern states that special consideration must be given to the welfare of those who undertake substantial risks for the benefit of others in a cooperative scheme. We make sense of the substantial risk of moral concern lab technicians face by drawing on Rawls' notion of imperfect procedures of justice. Imperfect procedures of justice are those that aim for just outcomes, but procedures do not guarantee those outcomes. Animal experimentation belongs to this category, as it aims for only ethical experiments to be conducted, yet that result is not guaranteed by its procedures. The risk of moral injury falls heavily on lab technicians as they will be the ones to implement the unethical experiment. Hence, we make sense of the puzzling intuition that lab technicians have conducted an unethical experiment yet are owed psychological support.