EBVEF Framework | Joie Lamar, PhD

Re-engineering the moral architecture of care.

EBVEF connects technology design, ethics, and policy. Joie Lamar’s framework asks how empathy can move from an aspiration to an actionable engineering principle, challenging design logics that privilege efficiency, control, and human-centred assumptions.

Four interdependent pillars

Ethical Design Ontology

Begin with explicit moral objectives. Evaluate prototypes and algorithms for technical soundness and their effects on animals’ experiences.

Multi-Species Participatory Design

Bring animals’ behavioural signals of preference, comfort, and distress into design feedback, interpreted with appropriate species and individual context.

Empathic Metrics and Evaluation

Consider affective, relational, and ecological domains: emotional wellbeing, human-animal interaction, and wider environmental and social effects.

Institutional Implementation and Policy Integration

Connect empathy-based innovation with education, proposed Empathy Impact Assessments, multispecies ethics committees, and governance.

Foundations

Bioethical and virtue ethics; systems and posthumanist ethics; participatory design and slow technology form the philosophical and methodological foundations described in the paper.

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Publication details, abstract & citation →

The download includes the full author-supplied paper, its references, a new cover, and the framework diagram. It discusses a conceptual welfare-monitoring application, implications, limitations, and future research.

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EBVEF is presented as a conceptual framework. Empathic measurement, cross-species participation, and institutional implementation require further empirical investigation; this overview does not imply a validated assessment instrument or an existing regulatory certification requirement.