Jonathan Moreno

State militaries have strong interests in developing enhanced warfighters: taking otherwise healthy service personnel (soldiers, marines, pilots, etc.) and pushing their biological, physiological, and cognitive capacities beyond their individual statistical or baseline norm. However, the ethical and regulatory challenges of justifying research into these kinds of interventions to demonstrate the efficacy and safety of enhancements in the military has not been well explored. In this paper, we offer, in the context of the US Common Rule and Institutional Review Board framework, potential justifications for justifying research into enhancing warfighters on the grounds of (1) individual and group risk reduction, (2) protection of third parties such as civilians, and (3) military effectiveness.

This chapter considers bioethics in the United States as a political terrain for competing visions of American liberalism. In accordance with the U.S. belief in moral progress, a key social function of U.S. bioethics is to be an agent of progress in respecting individual rights and interests; dedication to reasonable compromise and mutual accommodation; and optimism about individual privacy, free choice, equal opportunity, and liberty ordered by law. U.S. bioethics has become a new discipline and profession because of its ideological service to mainstream American liberalism's public philosophy, advancing the social ideal of the self-sovereign individual.

Tomoko Sato’s suggestion is an heroic attempt to rescue the notion of species membership from the operations of modern biology by associating it with the idea of family membership. But the findings of evolutionary biology itself complicate matters. The comments of Satoshi Kodama and Kyoko Takashima demonstrate the usefulness of comparative bioethics. The author would add that the influence of conservative cultural views of the human embryo and its “inviolability”, even for medical science, is a distinct factor, in addition to the sharp delineation that they mention between human and non-human species.

In this paper the author explores the bioethical issues concerning with the creation of the laboratory animal model known as a chimera. The author argues that these issues need to be placed within the context of the politics of biology, or biopolitics. Rather than power over bodies and populations per se, the new biopolitics has to do with control over the tissues, systems and information that are the basis and manifestation of life in its various forms. This new political struggle is vastly more subtle and in some ways potentially more powerful than more familiar examples like the ability to terminate a pregnancy or certain gross efforts to manage heredity, and many more parties will be in a position to compete with the state for biopower than in the past.

Horizon scanning is intended to identify opportunities and threats associated with technology, regulatory, and social change. Here, we report the results of a new horizon scan based on inputs of an international group of 33 participants, focusing on future issues arising from the military use of artificial intelligence (AI) for augmenting human performance. The final list of 12 issues includes topics spanning from the political (educating and training individuals to accept and work with AI), to the regulatory (issues of consent to human-AI teaming and hybridization), to security (the hackability of neural devices that connect to AI), to philosophical (the nature and phenomenology of brain-to-brain interfaces). The early identification of such issues is relevant to researchers, policymakers, military practitioners, and the wider public.

Horizon scanning is intended to identify opportunities and threats associated with technology, regulatory, and social change. Here, we report the results of a new horizon scan based on inputs of an international group of 33 participants, focusing on future issues arising from the military use of artificial intelligence (AI) for augmenting human performance. The final list of 12 issues includes topics spanning from the political (educating and training individuals to accept and work with AI), to the regulatory (issues of consent to human-AI teaming and hybridization), to security (the hackability of neural devices that connect to AI), to philosophical (the nature and phenomenology of brain-to-brain interfaces). The early identification of such issues is relevant to researchers, policymakers, military practitioners, and the wider public.

Convinced that armed conflict with the Soviet Union was all but inevitable, that such conflict would involve unconventional atomic, biological, and chemical warfare, and that research with human subjects was essential to respond to the threat, in the early 1950s the U.S. Department of Defense promulgated a policy governing human experimentation based on the Nuremberg Code. Yet the policymaking process focused on the abstract issue of whether human experiments should go forward at all, ignoring the reality of humans subjects research already under way and leaving unanswered ethical questions about how to conduct such research. Documents newly released to the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments tell the story of the Pentagon policy.

Recent efforts to support state regulation of risky behavior like cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, driving without seatbelts and riding motorcycles without helmets have focused on economic justifications—the costs to society of the consequences of these activities. However, opponents have successfully argued that the economic burdens of regulation outweigh the social benefits. To reduce the toll on society of these behaviors, we need justification for regulation that asserts the moral primacy of health and the well‐being of the community.

Horizon scanning is intended to identify opportunities and threats associated with technology, regulatory, and social change. Here, we report the results of a new horizon scan based on inputs of an international group of 33 participants, focusing on future issues arising from the military use of artificial intelligence (AI) for augmenting human performance. The final list of 12 issues includes topics spanning from the political (educating and training individuals to accept and work with AI), to the regulatory (issues of consent to human-AI teaming and hybridization), to security (the hackability of neural devices that connect to AI), to philosophical (the nature and phenomenology of brain-to-brain interfaces). The early identification of such issues is relevant to researchers, policymakers, military practitioners, and the wider public.

Bioethics literature on national security issues is surprisingly sparse and the implications of neuroscience for national security are of increasing public and scholarly interest. This article elaborates one important source of evidence that can be found in reports by US government advisory committees over the past few years. It demonstrates that the growing interest in neuroscience on the part of national security agencies can be discerned in part by reviewing recent reports from the US National Academies. The relationship between national security concerns and neuroscience is complex. Primary questions are discussed in the anthropomorphic terms of concerns and goals, and there is no inference to any particular sort of deliberations within these systems that leads ineluctably to a certain science policy agenda. This article also assesses the cultural underpinnings of neuroscience and ethical implications of evolving neurotechnologic capacity.