When you say “surely”, what do you mean? It would certainly be legal and moral. Would a body of research generated only by people who agree with a specific assumption be better in terms of truth-seeking than that of researchers receiving unconditional funding? Of that I’m not sure.
And now suppose it’s hard to measure whether a researcher conforms with the initial assumption, and in practice it is done by continual qualitative evaluation by the funder—is it now really only that initial assumption (e.g. animals deserve moral consideration) that’s the condition for funding, or is it now a measure of how much the research conforms with the funder’s specific conclusions from that assumption (e.g. that welfarism is good)? In this case I have a serious doubt about whether the research produces valuable results (cf. publication bias).
When you say “surely”, what do you mean? It would certainly be legal and moral. Would a body of research generated only by people who agree with a specific assumption be better in terms of truth-seeking than that of researchers receiving unconditional funding? Of that I’m not sure.
And now suppose it’s hard to measure whether a researcher conforms with the initial assumption, and in practice it is done by continual qualitative evaluation by the funder—is it now really only that initial assumption (e.g. animals deserve moral consideration) that’s the condition for funding, or is it now a measure of how much the research conforms with the funder’s specific conclusions from that assumption (e.g. that welfarism is good)? In this case I have a serious doubt about whether the research produces valuable results (cf. publication bias).