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Summary
Pages 1-14

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From page 1...
... These investments cover a broad range of efforts, from fundamental research that might eventually support national security needs, broadly defined, to specific development and eventual production of weapons and other military materiel intended to address particular national security problems.
From page 2...
... This report begins with the assumption that defending and protecting national security against external threats are morally sound and ethically supportable societal goals. A related premise is that individuals who are part of the national security R&D establishment want to behave ethically.
From page 3...
... Concerns about technologies that can be used for both military and civilian purposes fall into this category. • Unanticipated, unforeseen, or inadvertent ELSI consequences of either research or applications; such consequences are usually manifested by something going awry, as when research does not proceed as expected and thus causes harm outside the original bounds on the research or when unanticipated applications raise additional ELSI concerns.
From page 4...
... Drawing on ELSI-related insights from the consideration of the three foundational ERA technologies and four ERA technology-based applications discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, the report sets forth a framework to help identify ethical, legal, and societal issues that might not otherwise be apparent to program officials. Addressing the relevant questions associated with each stakeholder should help to develop useful knowledge on ethical, legal, and societal issues regarding specific military R&D programs and projects.
From page 5...
... But the ability to respond quickly to unanticipated issues that do arise can be enhanced by addressing in advance a wide variety of identified issues, because that exercise provides building blocks upon which responses to unanticipated ELSI concerns can be crafted. In general, the task of anticipating ethical, legal, and societal issues that might emerge in the future would be much easier if the specific path of a given science or technology development were known in advance.
From page 6...
... To support, develop, and enhance the judgment of individual ­ roject p proposers and program officials, a number of mechanisms, sometimes topic specific, have been used to address ethical, legal, and societal issues -- some apply to research, and some to actual deployments of technology. Mechanisms discussed in Chapter 7 and Appendix D include self-regulation and self-awareness; DOD law-of-armed-conflict review and treaty compliance; codes of ethics and social responsibility in science, engineering, and medicine; ELSI research; oversight bodies (such as institutional review boards)
From page 7...
... Such breadth means that the ELSI concerns that may be associated with a given technology development are very hard to anticipate accurately at the start of that development. Using a diversity of sources of input with different intellectual and political perspectives on a given technology increases the likelihood that relevant ethical, legal, and societal issues will be revealed.
From page 8...
... To maximize the likelihood that ethical, legal, and societal issues will be addressed, an agency's senior leadership should designate a point of functional accountability for this responsibility. Parties with functional accountability provide a second line of defense against overlooking ELSI concerns that complements the primary role played by project teams in executing a program.
From page 9...
... 2.b–Reviewing proposals that raise ELSI concerns Once an agency has identified research proposals or projects that may raise significant ethical, legal, and societal issues, some closer scrutiny is needed to ascertain how likely it is that such issues will arise, how serious they are likely to be, and whether there are ways to mitigate them. Use of a systematic methodology, such as the analytical framework described in this report, can be helpful for identifying ethical, legal, and societal issues.
From page 10...
... 2.c–Monitoring R&D projects for the emergence of ethical, legal, and societal issues and making midcourse corrections when necessary Perfect prediction of significant ELSI concerns is virtually impossible, especially in an area as fraught with uncertainty as research on emerging and readily available technologies. Projects that seemed to raise significant ethical, legal, and societal issues may turn out to raise none; projects that seemed to have no ethical or societal implications may turn out to have hugely important consequences.
From page 11...
... may have points of view that were not well represented in an agency's internal deliberations about a given R&D project. Ongoing engagement throughout the course of a project may reveal the impending appearance of initially unanticipated ethical, legal, and societal issues, and thus provide early warning to program managers and enable a more rapid response if and when these new issues do appear.
From page 12...
... The fields that assess ELSI concerns arising with various technologies have their own vocabularies. At the very least, the agency personnel dealing with these issues will have to understand, at some level, the relevant "language." At the same time, those with ELSI responsibilities and/or expertise must have some understanding of the underlying research in order to identify issues that may or may not emerge.
From page 13...
... Leveraging policies and procedures already in place to address ELSI concerns associated with certain kinds of research will help to minimize unnecessary overhead in institutions performing research on ERA technologies with military significance, and where policies and procedures already exist to address ethical, legal, and societal issues that are common to both military and civilian-oriented research, new ones should not be created to address them.


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