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5 An Analytical Framework for Identifying Ethical, Legal, and Societal Issues
Pages 163-211

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From page 163...
... Note that the framework is offered as a starting point for discussion and is not intended to be comprehensive. It is useful primarily for raising ELSI concerns that might not otherwise have been apparent to decision makers.
From page 164...
... . The science of effective public participation is summarized by a recent National Research Council report.3 1 National Research Council, Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Program Assessment, The National Academies Press, Washington D.C., 2008, available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?
From page 165...
... But the impact on operators and users of technology is relevant as well. Soldiers with prostheses that can enhance their function over normal human function or pilots of remotely piloted vehicles who execute their missions far away from immediate danger have a psychological relationship to their jobs different from that of soldiers who are not as privileged.
From page 166...
... As the Belmont report stated, "The problem posed by these imperatives is to decide when it is justifiable to seek certain benefits despite the risks involved, and when the benefits should be foregone because of the risks." Respect for Persons In the context of conducting R&D, the principle of respect for persons suggests that the effort should obtain voluntary informed consent from parties that are directly involved in such research and act in the best interests of parties that are not capable of providing such consent (e.g., those indirectly affected by the research)
From page 167...
... • If parties directly involved in research related to a particular application are members of the U.S. armed forces, how and to what extent -- if any -- is there a conflict between their obligation to obey legal orders and their provision of informed consent on a voluntary basis?
From page 168...
... • What could be the nature of the impact, if any, on users of an application? For example, the extended use of a particular application may cause physical damage (e.g., it may require a user to sit at a keyboard for extended periods of time and thereby cause repetitive stress injuries)
From page 169...
... • Adversary development of countermeasures that negate or reduce the advantages afforded by new military applications. For example, the microwave-based Active Denial System can be countered through the use of aluminum foil to protect exposed areas of skin.8 In some cases, a remotely piloted vehicle can be "spoofed" into thinking that its location is a long way from where it actually is.9 For those cases in which countermeasures are relatively easy and inexpensive to develop, the wisdom of pursuing a given application may be questionable unless the primary value of the 7 The Stuxnet computer worm, first discovered in June 2010, was aimed at disrupting the operation of Iran's uranium enrichment facilities.
From page 170...
...  -- How do the benefits to the United States of pursuing a particular application unilaterally compare to the potential losses should an adversary develop similar applications in the future?
From page 171...
... program as indicative of an immoral, unethical, and hostile stance toward it? 5.1.4  Nonmilitary Users Military applications also sometimes have value to nonmilitary users.
From page 172...
... military is legally permitted to participate in domestic law enforcement operations only at the request of civilian law enforcement authorities. Thus, a relevant question is the following: • If the military application in question were deployed to support law enforcement operations, how and to what extent, if any, could such deployment raise ethical, legal, and societal issues that do not arise in the military context?
From page 173...
... 5.1.5 Organizations For the U.S. armed forces, military applications of technology do not exist in a vacuum.
From page 174...
... Questions relevant for noncombatants as stakeholders in the use of new military applications may include the following: • How and to what extent could an application affect noncombatants on and off the battlefield? Although it is true that a weapon can be used in ways that cause excessive collateral damage and other ways that do not, a weapon that is inherently incapable of discriminating between combatants and noncombatants may well raise ethical, legal, and societal issues.
From page 175...
... That is, in some cases, similar ethical, legal, and societal issues appear in considering the perspectives of a number of stakeholders. This report identifies as cross­ utting themes issues related to scale, humanity, technological imper c fections, unanticipated military uses, crossovers to civilian use, changing ethical standards, ELSI considerations in a classified environment, and opportunity costs.
From page 176...
... • If an application becomes successful because of the increased functionality it affords to its users, and such functionality becomes essential for individuals participating in society, how and to what extent, if any, can the costs of obtaining an essential application be made broadly affordable so that all individuals can obtain its benefits equally? This question is especially relevant to military applications that turn out to have civilian utility, as might be the case for advanced prosthetic limbs originally designed to serve the medical needs of soldiers injured in battle.
From page 177...
... 12 In a military context, many applications of technology pose issues related to extending human capabilities. Prostheses could be developed to enhance human functions -- physical functions such as lifting strength and running speed and sensory functions such as night vision and enhanced smell.
From page 178...
... Questions relevant to concerns about technologies' effects on individuals' sense of humanity may include the following: • How and to what extent, if at all, does a new military application 13 For example, the World War II Baltimore-class cruiser (CA-68) displaced 13,600 tons and carried a crew ranging from 1650 to 1950 individuals.
From page 179...
... Technological imperfections raise ethical, legal, and societal issues for a number of reasons. Under the pressure of delivering a potentially important new capability, applications developers may make choices that provide less safety, reliability, or controllability than they can with subsequent generations -- and ethical, legal, and societal issues arise when an application affords less safety, reliability, or controllability than it could afford.
From page 180...
... Questions relevant to technological imperfections as they affect applications might include the following: • Who decides the appropriate safety requirements associated with a new application? • On what basis are such decisions made?
From page 181...
... Indeed, vendors may well approach law enforcement authorities with proposals to sell versions of military applications customized for law enforcement purposes. In any event, the civilian law enforcement use of an application originally intended to operate in a military context generally calls forth a different set of ELSI considerations.
From page 182...
... All of these nonmilitary applications raise ethical, legal, and societal issues that do not appear in a military context, even if the technology needs only relatively minor changes in transitioning from military to civilian uses. For example, sophisticated prostheses generally provide more capability and thus cost more; increased costs are easier to accommodate politically when they support soldiers wounded in action than when they may be used to support civilians injured in the course of everyday life.
From page 183...
... Many militaries reject such obligations, but militaries are only one of the stakeholders involved in ethical discussions.18 Such considerations regarding ethical standards raise the following questions: • If an application is intended to address a military issue that previously had to be addressed by humans, what is the minimum standard of performance that the application must meet before it is deemed acceptable for widespread use? • How and to what extent, if any, does a new application create new ethical obligations to use it in preference to older applications addressing similar problems that may raise ELSI concerns to a greater extent?
From page 184...
... This juxtaposition raises a dilemma that is unique to environments in which classified research is conducted -- how to coordinate research in such environments when there may be different levels of secrecy associated with the research, and how to establish effective ELSI oversight in these environments. Staying abreast of developments and the associated benefits and risks can also be difficult for policy makers.
From page 185...
... 5.2.9  Sources of Insight from Chapter 4 Chapter 4 describes a number of different possible sources of ELSI insight relevant to considering the impact of R&D on new technologies in a military context, including philosophical ethics and various disciplinary approaches to ethics; international law; sociology, anthropology, and psychology; scientific framing of research problems; the precautionary principle and cost-benefit analysis; and risk communication. Depending on the particular research effort at hand, one or more of these sources of insight might be regarded as a crosscutting approach offering questions relevant to decision making about how to proceed.
From page 186...
... The operative question is the extent and nature of the commonality, if any, between the technology in question and its application and other technologies raising ELSI concerns. Such characteristics include technological complexities and uncertainties as well as societal sensitivities about the technology and its application.
From page 187...
... What Should Be Done? 20 provides some general top-level guidance for what it means to "consider the ethics of doing scientific research." That report identifies a number of useful steps: • Framing the problem, including ethical dimensions and issues; recognizing it is an iterative process; • Soliciting advice and opinions in the problem development phase and throughout the process as needed; developing communications strategies; • Identifying relevant stakeholders and socio-technical systems; collecting relevant data about them; • Understanding and evaluating relevant stakeholder perspectives; • Identifying value conflicts; • Constructing viable alternative courses of action or solutions and identifying constraints; • Assessing alternatives in terms of consequences, public defensibility, institutional barriers, and so on; • Engaging in reasoned dialogue or negotiations; and • Revising options, plans, or actions.
From page 188...
... Revisiting these elements allows for reconsideration of prior decisions. Soliciting Advice; Developing Communications Strategies To go forward, Director might speak with trusted advisors and experts or construct an informal advisory group to provide background guidance in developing an options paper outlining what this proposal might consist of and accomplish.
From page 189...
... But they provide an approach for systematically understanding similarities and differences in competing ethical claims, and they call attention to aspects of ethical action that have to be considered in justifying any given action or policy and when comparing a possible action with alternative actions (including doing nothing)
From page 190...
... Understanding and Evaluating Stakeholder Perspectives A communications strategy can have an important payoff in collecting data about the reactions of different stakeholder groups -- from the most general level, including patient advocacy and family groups, to military veterans, as well as active members at various levels of the military hierarchy. Civilian sectors such as the sports industry and the transportation industry might also be consulted.
From page 191...
... She can ask whether she could comfortably defend the additional activities publicly and whether, should harm come to her as a result of one of these activities, she would still think it was good to have supported it.21 Undertaking a research program to augment human performance by using drugs raises ethical questions about the potential benefits, risks, and costs. Evidence of effectiveness is not beyond dispute, and there is considerable evidence that administration of certain drugs can lead to a variety of abuses.
From page 192...
... 5.3.3  Questions Related to Stakeholders and Crosscutting Themes As for the ELSI content that Director's analysis may uncover, the questions in the "Stakeholders" and "Crosscutting Themes" sections above, perhaps in modified form, are relevant to issues that may emerge. The approach taken in the present section describes the parties that have a stake, either direct or indirect, in the treatment of ethical, legal, and societal issues, and it poses questions that might be relevant to these stakeholders.
From page 193...
... She understands that exploring ethical, legal, and societal issues is a potentially unbounded enterprise, and that she is responsible for exercising her best judgment in determining how far to carry such exploration. She recognizes that exploring ethical, legal, and societal issues is often best done in parallel with the conduct of research, but that some level of preliminary exploration may be necessary to make such a determination.
From page 194...
... • If parties directly involved in such research are members of the U.S. armed forces, they could have an obligation to obey legal orders to participate in the research.
From page 195...
... But given societal concerns about enhancement drugs, the benefits of considering this potential issue may outweigh the costs. • Might an enhancement of the type being considered lead to heightening the stress that warfighters are under, for example by extending the period of time in which they are left in a battle zone?
From page 196...
... What role might or should Director play in encouraging such a conversation? A wide variety of issues different from those pertinent to military contexts are likely to arise, including issues of access (which commercial companies might profit from government efforts to develop the application)
From page 197...
... The themes are scale, humanity, unanticipated military uses, technological imperfections, crossover to civilian use, changing ethical standards, ELSI considerations in a classified environment, and opportunity costs. Although some of these issues are discussed above, particular aspects as they arise in some of these thematic areas are worth highlighting.
From page 198...
... 5.3.4  Developing a Future Course of Action Director can use the framework offered in this report to identify ethical concerns and relevant questions associated with each stakeholder. She can use this knowledge to determine how and to what extent, if any, a program or project might be modified -- or in extreme cases abandoned -- because of ELSI concerns.
From page 199...
... But the most important feature of this list is that there are more than two options -- that is, Director has choices other than ignoring ethical, legal, and societal issues entirely or discouraging the researcher entirely. Again, the working assumption for understanding the discussion below is that Director is a well-intentioned manager who wishes to proceed in an ELSI-responsible manner consistent with her responsibilities for advancing science and technology for national security purposes.
From page 200...
...  -- If parties directly involved in research related to a particular application are members of the U.S. armed forces, how and to what extent -- if any -- is there a conflict between their obligation to obey legal orders and their provision of informed consent on a voluntary basis?
From page 201...
...  -- How and to what extent could an adversary develop similar capabilities? What is the time scale on which an adversary could do so?
From page 202...
... Organizations • How and to what extent, if at all, could a new military application influence or change traditional structures and mechanisms of accountability and responsibility for its use? How will the organization react to such tendencies?
From page 203...
... restraint in pursuing a new military application induce other nations to exercise similar restraint? • How and to what extent, if any, could an application help to compromise human rights if used by another nation on its own citizens?
From page 204...
... What are the ELSI implications of such uses? Crossovers to Civilian Use • How and to what extent, if any, could civilian-oriented adaptations of military applications made widely available to citizens raise ethical and societal issues that do not arise in the military context?
From page 205...
... • How and to what extent, if any, does a new application create new ethical obligations to use it in preference to older applications addressing similar problems that may raise ELSI concerns to a greater extent? ELSI Considerations in a Classified Environment • How can research in a classified environment be reviewed for ELSI purposes?
From page 206...
... The purpose of this framework is not to impose compliance requirements on program managers, but rather to help them to do their jobs better and to help ensure that basic American ethical values are not compromised. The analytical framework is necessarily cast in somewhat broad and abstract terms because it is designed to apply to most R&D programs; consequently, not all questions in the framework will necessarily be relevant to any specific technology or application.
From page 207...
... Fourth, the framework does not provide a methodology for resolving or settling competing ethical claims, for choosing between ethical theories, or for providing specific answers to ethical questions, although it does call for decision makers to attend to a variety of ethical positions and approaches. At the same time, the framework does not assume that "anything goes," and it posits that through deliberation and discussion, it is often possible to identify initial ethical positions that are more well grounded and defensible or less so.
From page 208...
... will almost surely have more ELSI impact in the long run than one whose scope of relevance is narrow. • A technology or application whose operation has the potential to result in intended or unintended consequences that could cause harm to people on a very large scale is likely to raise more ELSI concerns than one without such potential.
From page 209...
... 5.4.4  Frequently Heard Arguments Finally, it is helpful to address a number of frequently heard arguments about ethics as they apply to new military technologies. Specifically, one common thread of the arguments discussed below is that they are often made with the intent or desire of cutting off debate or discussion about ethical issues.
From page 210...
... from decisions based on demonstrating how it can be used to confer military advantages (a more decisive step) , and to make such decisions separately.
From page 211...
... At the same time, those grains of truth should not be amplified to the point that they render discussion of ELSI considerations illegitimate -- the short responses to the frequently heard arguments are intended essentially as points of departure for further dialogue.


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