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Abstract

Biological and chemical weapons are the only two weapon classes that are comprehensively banned as weapons of war by international law. The prohibition of biological and chemical weapons is said to be based on an ancient cross-cultural taboo against poison and disease weapons, which has now been codiﬁed in international law. However, moral and ethical reasons have also been used to justify research, development, and use of these weapons in the past and are being reused to undermine the modern norm against these weapons and threaten their reemergence. This entry looks at the arguments used to justify the use and development of chemical and biological weapons in light of a changing nature and character of organized violence and technological advances.

Introduction

A central concept in ethics is the minimization of suffering – it is this very concept that has been used to justify the use of chemical and biological weapons and to argue for their abolition. The entry aims to provide the bioethicist with an overview and insight into some ethical dimensions of biological and chemical weapons. The entry does not offer a comprehensive overview of weapon development, past state programs, scientist responsibilities, or signiﬁcant episodes of their use. Instead, this entry is concerned with the central arguments for and against the use of these weapons, as well as the rationalization and justiﬁcation that poison and disease weapons are apt for minimizing suffering.

The entry is structured in the following way: First is a brief sketch of chemical and biological weapons (CBW) and their emergence, followed by the prohibition of these weapons which has developed in tandem or as a response to their use. Second, the nature of biological and chemical weapons is discussed including a discussion of what sets CBW apart from other means of inﬂicting harm. Third, the ethical dimension of CBW as a humanitarian weapon is examined. The last part is a conclusion bringing the discussed strands together.

History And Development

Disease and poisons have a long history of use as weapons of war and have an equally long history of moral opprobrium associated with them. Thus, two kinds of historical developments are sketched out here: the technological aspect of using disease and poisons as weapons and the development of an international regime against their use. These two are, of course, inextricably linked – advances in weapon technology and their appropriation in war ﬁghting have always been accompanied by discussions of ethics, morality, and (in)humanity of their use, from the introduction of the longbow, machine gun, submarine, and nuclear weapons to the present case of chemical and biological weapons.

Chemical And Biological Weapons

Historical antecedents of the use of poison and disease are interesting and possibly illuminating in terms of normative prohibitions against the use of these weapons. However, it is important to distinguish these episodes from the modern understanding of CBW. An understanding of how disease and toxins work is not necessary to use them as weapons. Poisons and disease have been used without any knowledge of the causative or active ingredients or mechanisms. Without this understanding, the use of disease and toxins is haphazard and a matter of chance – which does not mean that it is ineffective. Historical examples of well poisonings, hurling diseased bodies over the walls of besieged cities, and distribution of disease tainted gifts such as blankets and handkerchiefs bear witness to the devastating effects poison and disease can have even without understanding the underlying mechanisms. Also, the use of poisons and disease for assassinations, sabotage, or simply in hunting with poisoned darts and arrows does not require knowledge of causative mechanisms to yield reproducible effects. However, in order to make CBW in the modern sense, knowledge of the causative agent and notions of mechanisms are required.

Up until the mid-nineteenth century, disease was thought to be caused by bad air, foul smells, or the pollution of decay – noxious vapors coming from putrescent organic matter, called “miasma” accordingly, in which disease generates spontaneously. The formulation of the germ theory of disease – following the work of, among others, John Snow, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and Robert Koch toward the end of the nineteenth century – enabled less haphazard and more deliberate, targeted use. Only following the identiﬁcation of the causative agents of disease was it possible to “bottle disease.” The germ theory of disease and the understanding of disease causation did not only herald the start of modern medicine but it also enabled germ warfare in its modern incarnation.

Similarly, the rapid expansion of the chemical industry during the late industrial revolution, initially driven by innovation and requirements of the textile and dye industry, led to discoveries that enabled scaling of chemical processes and the ability to synthesize compounds, delivering militarily signiﬁcant quantities of toxic chemicals.

A revolution in a number of other industries including pharmaceutical and agrochemical increased availability of chemical compounds and accelerated their identiﬁcation and characterization, as well as the discovery of their properties and their action on life processes.

A Normative Regime Against Biological And Chemical Weapons

The earliest known examples of the prohibition of poison and disease weapons date back to circa 500 BC in the Hindu Laws of Manu; the earliest recorded instances are found in Sanskrit in AD 150. Later iterations of a codiﬁcation of ethical and moral objections to the use of poison and disease weapons can be found in Roman, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim legal traditions (Jefferson 2009). Regulation of the conduct of war leading to the modern international codiﬁcation of the prohibition of chemical and biological weapons can be traced to Western European medieval Christian doctrine and standards of chivalry. Traditions and customs in the conduct of war were codiﬁed in military manuals following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Various international bodies sought to moderate the conduct of hostilities resulting in the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868 and the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 (van Wynen Thomas and Thomas 1970).

The modern regime against CBW is a complex interconnected construct of rules, codes, norms, and laws. At the basis of the modern regime are three principal instruments of international law: the 1925 Geneva Protocol, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.

Building on the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the high contracting parties to the 1925 Geneva Protocol agreed to prohibit the “use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices” and “bacteriological methods of warfare.” The Protocol was a response to the horrors of gas warfare in World War I. The 1925 Geneva Protocol was hampered by the context of the time of signing, rendering it in essence a “no-ﬁrst-use agreement,” only applicable to armed conﬂict, limited to use, signiﬁcantly excluding development and stockpiling, and riddled with reservations from several major powers. Over time though, the 1925 Geneva Protocol has become widely accepted as part of customary international law, binding upon all states.

The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) contains in its preambular paragraph a strong normative statement: the states parties are determined “for the sake of all mankind, to exclude completely the possibility of bacteriological (biological) agents and toxins being used as weapons, convinced that such use would be repugnant to the conscience of mankind and that no effort should be spared to minimize this risk.” The prohibition is comprehensive and extends to uses against humans, other animals, and plants. The BWC extends the no-ﬁrst-use agreement of the 1925 Geneva Protocol and outlaws development, production, stockpiling, retention, and acquisition of “[m]icrobial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justiﬁcation for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes” and their means of delivery.

The third principal instrument is the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). It prohibits use, development, production, and stockpiling of any weapons that rely on toxicity to cause effects. That means the use of “[a]ny chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals” according to the deﬁnitions set out in the treaty text. The CWC also contains a normative statement espousing the states parties’ determination “for the sake of all mankind, to exclude completely the possibility of the use of chemical weapons” and that the “achievements in the ﬁeld of chemistry should be used exclusively for the beneﬁt of mankind.”

Industrial, agricultural, research, medical, pharmaceutical, or other peaceful purposes are exempt from the prohibitions of the BWC and CWC as long as “the types and quantities are consistent with such purposes” (CWC) and have a “justiﬁcation for prophylactic, protective, and other peaceful purposes” (BWC). The exemption exists to not unduly restrict or inhibit uses of scientiﬁc, economic, and societal beneﬁt. The prohibition of certain “uses” rather than “things” is known as a general purpose criterion and allows the peaceful exploitation and application of these inherently dual-use technologies. By shunning lists of particular prohibited items, the general purpose criterion also protects the relatively static treaty texts from being outpaced by technological developments since all biological and chemical substances “regardless of their origin or method of production” are included. The deﬁnition of scope with reference to the purposes of use is the normative and ethical backbone of the regime – use of biology and chemistry is only allowed for peaceful uses and those that are beneﬁcial.

Critically, the CWC contains an exception for the use of toxic chemicals against humans, namely, for “law enforcement including domestic riot control purposes.” Agents for riot control are deﬁned as those that “can produce rapidly in humans sensory irritation or disabling physical effects which disappear within a short time following termination of exposure.” Riot control agents are prohibited “as a method of warfare.”

The core framework of international law is supplemented by various national, regional, and international measures, rules, legislative acts, and codes of conduct which form the regime against CBW, or a “web of prevention” (Rappert and McLeish 2007). The regime has grown more complex to meet the increasingly complex technological challenge of chemical and biological weapons and a changed security context.

Technology And CBW

Advances in science and technology, foremost the industrialization of chemical processes and advances in the understanding of disease causation, enabled the manufacture and use of large quantities of chemical agents on the battleﬁelds of WWI and the development of biological means of warfare in militarily signiﬁcant types and quantities. Rapid progress in availability and power of enabling technologies together with rapid diffusion of research capacities and the integration of multiple disciplines, such as engineering and metallurgy, provided access to all major combatants of WWI to chemical weapons. Similar trends also enabled later development of biological weapons.

Curiously, it is precisely these trends that were also highlighted a hundred years later when the security implications of developments in the life sciences were considered (National Research Council 2011; OPCW 2014). Nowadays, the challenge includes proliferation of traditional research settings, diffusion of knowledge and materials outside of traditional research and development settings, further geographic diffusion, and computer-mediated and computer-automated processes of discovery, development, and transfer of material and knowledge. The genetic revolution has brought further convergence of disciplines. Chemicals can be synthesized in bespoke biological systems, and biological material can be chemically synthesized. New areas such as neuroscience provide further insight into the working of cognitive processes and open up potential for manipulation, while advances in nanotechnologies, for example, allow for modalities of drug delivery previously unavailable. Information technologies enabled automation, modeling, and processing of the requisite vast amounts of data. These advances hold great potential for both benevolent and malevolent uses.

Conceptual Definition/Clarification

Several concepts pertaining to CBW require clariﬁcation here. First and foremost is: What are biological and chemical weapons? Chemical and biological weapons are a broad category of weapons that attack humans, animals, and plants through their toxic or infectious properties. Biological weapons are broadly bacteria, viruses, fungi, and rickettsia – microorganisms that cause harm through infecting the target organism. Insects and other arthropods have been considered as weapons against plants or as delivery mechanisms. Some organisms produce their harmful effects by producing active compounds that interfere with life processes; these toxins can also be used in isolation, for example, botulinum toxin, capsaicin, or animal venoms. Then there are a range of compounds that have regulatory functions in living organisms which can be used to interfere with the proper functioning of a target organism, for example, auxin, a plant hormone used as herbicide.

The Biological Weapons Convention deﬁnes biological weapons, in part, as “[m]icrobial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justiﬁcation for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.” Toxins overlap with the category of chemical weapons. For example, ricin, a toxic plant protein, and saxitoxin, an algal toxin that bioaccumulates in shellﬁsh, are explicitly covered by the veriﬁcation provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Chemical weapons are deﬁned in the Chemical Weapons Convention, in part, as “[a]ny chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals. This includes all such chemicals, regardless of their origin or of their method of production, and regardless of whether they are produced in facilities, in munitions or elsewhere.” The deﬁnition rests on the purpose a chemical is put to, namely, causing death, temporary incapacitation, or permanent harm. The nature and type of the chemical are irrelevant as long as its chemical action adversely affects life processes. Lethality of chemical agents is a function of dose and response to exposure; it is not a deﬁning feature, so that there cannot be a clear differentiation between lethal, disabling, and incapacitating chemicals – tear gases can be lethal and “lethal” nerve agents can be survived (Robinson 2009; World Health Organization 2004).

There is considerable overlap between chemical and biological weapons, so that it makes sense to talk about a continuum of agents that cause harm through toxic action or infection. Indeed, the separation of chemical and biological weapons into two categories, with two separate attendant treaties, is an artifact of a difﬁcult multilateral negotiating history (Sims 2001). The treaties, thus, overlap signiﬁcantly in the middle of the spectrum between effects caused by infection and those caused by toxicity.

A range of effects is available from CBW, and they can be used for different purposes, including contamination of food, water, and crops; contamination of landscape, to deny the use or access to an area; as well as a range of psychological effects, from fear of contamination to psychosomatic effects and panic. Effects can range from localized nuisance to wide-area effects; however, effects are indiscriminate unless administered to a speciﬁc individual.

Unlike kinetic means of attacking the body, CBW turns the attack inside out, insidiously contaminating the body and attacking it from within. The fundamental difference of chemical and biological weapons is that they are able to attack the body by interfering, disrupting, manipulating, and inhibiting any life process. In principle, it is possible to target individual processes, including cognition, emotion, movement, sensation, perception, reproduction, immunity, development, and other bodily functions – in short any process that is biochemically controlled and sufﬁciently understood. In practice the ability to actually interfere, disrupt, and manipulate some of these processes in the ﬁeld may be limited by their complexity. According to the functionalist view of consciousness, higher cognitive functions do not have a single locale, or single mechanism, but arise out of complexity and interactions. For the time being, manipulation of higher cognitive functions is plausible but not a reality – emotional states cannot be produced or altered by immersion in an aerosol, unless by accident. However, research is ongoing, especially in the area of psychopharmacology, neurological processes, drug targeting, and delivery.

Ethical Dimension

What is it that makes poison and toxin weapons that deserve special attention? Is there something that sets chemical and biological weapons apart from other horrendous ways to kill, maim, disable, and injure? Certainly, other categories of weapons hold their own horrors: the demonstrated mass destruction and still ever present catastrophic potential of nuclear weapons; the continuous indiscriminate killing, maiming, and contamination of vast stretches of land by mines and cluster munitions; and the ubiquity and sheer destruction of individual lives and whole societies wreaked by the impact of small and light arms. These are just a few examples of weapon systems that deeply undermine humanitarian standards; their development, production, stockpiling, transfer, and trade continue to raise desperate ethical challenges. However, only biological and chemical weapons have been comprehensively banned as weapons of war. CBW are the only two categories of weapons that have been developed on industrial scales and then banned and destroyed. Robinson poses the conundrum in the following way: “Weapons of any type are designed to harm, and there is no obvious reason for regarding one type of weaponised harm as more (or less) reprehensible than another. Is it worse to be the victim of unnatural disease than, say, to be shattered by shell fragments? One may ask this and then be surprised that so strong an obloquy should nevertheless have attached to disease weapons and not to other weapons. There is an irrationality here whose very strength and depth is characteristic of a taboo” (Robinson 2009).

The reason for international condemnation of CBW is a complex mix of various motivations and considerations, including economic, social, political, and strategic. The reasons certainly include some ethical considerations borne out of past experiences of gas warfare in various parts of the world, the potentially devastating effects of disease weapons evident from trials, experiments and use, but also the relative unreliability of these weapons in a military sense, the relative ease with which they can be defended against, and the superior strategic role of nuclear weapons available to some of the key actors at the time when negotiations for the ban were initiated.

The strength, validity, and even the existence of a universally shared moral opprobrium, an ancient cross-cultural taboo, or an ethical standard against disease and poison weapons might be questioned because of past development, use, and continued military interest.

Conversely, it might be that the very strength of the taboo shows itself in that transgression of the moral boundaries inherent in the use of these weapons requires special justiﬁcation. The section below looks at three brief historical vignettes to illustrate the use of the humanitarian argument in the justiﬁcation for the use of chemical and biological weapons.

Humanitarian Arguments: Historical Vignettes

The modern use of chemical and biological weapons has since its inception appealed to humanitarian arguments to justify use. The ﬁrst large-scale use of chemical weapons was on the battleﬁelds of WWI. Trench warfare on the Western Front locked opposing sides into a grinding war of attrition, exacting a grueling toll on human lives and pitting the economic resources of industrial nations against each other. Fritz Haber, a noted chemist and later the recipient of the Nobel Prize for chemistry, was appointed to the German War Ofﬁce as a consultant. Haber was concerned with breaking the devastating stalemate and hastening the end of the hostilities to avoid further loss of lives. Rationalizing that toxic chemicals would bring about a quick victory, he organized the ﬁrst large-scale use of a chemical weapon in war. He was the driver and architect of the German chemical weapons capability and considered chemical warfare as a “higher form of killing,” patriotically seconding his scientiﬁc knowledge to the war effort (Harris and Paxman 2002). On 22 and 23 April 1915, Haber oversaw the ﬁrst large-scale release of chlorine gas from thousands of cylinders along the front of the second battle of Ypres, causing 5000 to die of asphyxiation and injuring more than 15,000 of the unprotected French and Canadian troops. Haber’s hopes for a rapid cessation of hostilities through the introduction of gas warfare were not realized. Over the course of WWI more than 124,000 metric tons of toxic chemicals, including mustard gas and phosgene, was used, on all sides of the conﬂict, killing more than 90,000 and left more than one million with debilitating injuries by the use of chemical weapons alone. Although historians disagree about the casualty ﬁgures caused by gas warfare, unanimity exists about the horrendous consequences and suffering caused.

Similar to the rationalization of Haber’s patriotically inspired argument that breaking the siege of trench warfare would hasten the end of hostilities, thereby saving lives, was the justiﬁcation brought by Paul Fildes. In 1944, Fildes, a bacteriologist and head of the Biology Department Porton, the British military’s research establishment, argued that a civilian in conventional bombings suffers from “considerable mental disturbance long before he is buried under a pile of rubble … the suffering he had undergone is often terminated by [fatal] bacterial septicaemia.” However, biological weapons have the same effect, he argued, “without the distressing preliminaries” (Balmer 2013, p. 25).

During the 1950s and 1960s, concepts of limited war entered military doctrines, supplementing general war (nuclear) concepts. The role of incapacitating agents was investigated and eventually adopted into military arsenals. The developments were, in part, driven by the discovery of LSD in 1943, a powerful psychoactive compound that causes delirium and hallucinations (Robinson 2012). Central nervous system stimulants, such as LSD, and central nervous system depressants, such as Sernyl which is also known as PCP or recreational illicit drug “Angel Dust,” were at the time proclaimed to deliver “war without death” through the use of “fear gas.” Neither LSD nor Sernyl was eventually adopted into military arsenals, but other central nervous system depressants were developed and standardized for military use (Kirby 2006).

Each one of these three vignettes shares certain features. Technological progress and scientiﬁc discovery opened up new opportunities to use novel means of war ﬁghting. New challenges in war ﬁghting and the modalities of organized violence provided the justiﬁcation that led to the exploitation of contemporary technologies. From gas warfare of WWI to the search for non-lethal weapons for law enforcement and riot control purposes, humanitarian arguments have accompanied the development and use.

Similar episodes of moral ambiguity can be found throughout the history of weapon development and are not exclusive to CBW. WWI trench warfare was partly a result of the introduction of the machine gun, which was, ironically, once hoped to make the conduct of war more humane. The inventor of the dominant design of the machine gun which precipitated the situation of the trenches, Richard Gatling, supposed that the machine gun might “supersede the necessity of large armies and consequently exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished”(Ellis 1986). It is also worth pointing that once justiﬁcations, either for humanitarian purposes or as a retaliatory or deterrent capability, have been found, development becomes an engineering and technological challenge of problem solving, performance enhancements, and reliability assurance – quite dissociated from the need for further justiﬁcation. Ethical dilemmas for scientists and engineers developing and producing weapon technology are resolved by cultural, personal, and institutional practices and justiﬁcations (Gusterson 1996). The humanitarian argument is particularly powerful at the point of deciding to pursue a particular course of action, to embark on a particular technological pathway.

Exemptions And Exceptionalism

The fulcrum, over which the prohibition is levered, is the changing nature and character of organized violence, not advances in science and technology. Advances in science and technology provide opportunity; exceptional circumstances provide the context and justiﬁcation to pursue the opportunity.

The twentieth century, which provided new security contexts with the wholesale destruction and intractable scenarios of WWI, Cold War doctrines, and paranoia around total and limited war concepts, saw a role for chemical and biological weapons in massive state programs as well as a supplement to conventional and nuclear capabilities.

The twenty-ﬁrst century presents another shift in the predominant forms of organized violence, a shift away from broadly state centric inter-state conﬂicts and major civil wars to messier asymmetrical conﬂicts, terrorism, and intra-state violence. These conﬂicts are often internationally networked, involving resource-related violence, gang violence, and violence linked to trafﬁcking of arms, substances, and people, as well as violence associated with global ideological struggles and identity-based conﬂicts (Kaldor 2006).

These conﬂicts have generated renewed interest in some types of CBW. The utility of CBW has already shifted from being a tool for speciﬁc permitted operations, such as riot control and law enforcement, to a tool of quasimilitary law enforcement operations, including counterterrorism and anti-narcotic operations.

Ethical Ambiguity: Permissible Uses

The international regime against chemical and biological weapons has one critical exemption – the use of toxic chemicals against humans for purposes of domestic riot control and law enforcement. The nature of domestic riot control and law enforcement is not further deﬁned. However, the circumstance in which a toxic chemical is used is important, because they may not be used “as a method of warfare.” The changing security context blurs the line between traditional understandings of war and situations other than war.

Irritant agents have found frequent use to quell demonstrations and political dissent. The use of certain toxic chemicals against people is considered legitimate for purposes of riot control and law enforcement. Disproportionate and inappropriate use in these cases is a matter of human rights law. Even if some of these instances are seen as failures of overzealous law enforcement, or transgressions of human rights standards, such use continues to erode the norm against CBW and normalizes its use.

A number of countries have explicitly stated that only agents such as tear gases are considered acceptable as riot control agents, rather than anesthetics or psychoactive agents, to restrict ﬂexibility in the interpretation of the exemption. However, state practice points to various different interpretations of permissible uses, which include: lethal injections; chemical castrations; subduing, disorientating, and incapacitating suspects; disciplining prisoners; suppressing political dissent; riot control; counterterrorism operations; special forces operations, such as hostage situations; and international peacekeeping operations. Variation or outright rejection of some of these practices on moral grounds indicates an ethical ambiguity in the interpretation of the perceived legitimacy of these practices.

The use of weapons employing toxic chemicals or disease can always lead to fatalities. Biological and chemical weapons do not offer a nonlethal alternative. Technical advice and assessments have attempted to set thresholds of speciﬁc or acceptable limits of lethality to qualify a weapon as “nonlethal.” In discourse various terms have been used to describe weapons that do not primarily aim to kill, including nonlethal, less-than-lethal, incapacitating, and disabling. The efﬁcacy, and ultimately the lethality of an agent interacting with its target, is a question of degree: a function of exposure and response of the victim. An agent that is harmless at low concentrations might have an overwhelming, or lethal, effect at higher doses. The threshold required to cause effects to appear also depends on the individual exposed; a child, for example, will succumb to the effects of a chemical agent more readily than an athletic adult. This is especially relevant when agents are used against mixed groups of people, say, in urban settings. The use of an aerosolized opiate by Russian Special Forces in a Moscow theater in 2002 to break a siege situation with 800 hostages caused 129 fatalities as a direct result of the incapacitating gas used. This episode highlights the fatal potential of so-called nonlethal agents.

Absence of international condemnation of this use of a toxic chemical indicates ambivalence and ambiguity in the interpretation of permissible uses. The absence of moral outrage might also indicate a shared view of perceived utility of this kind of weapon and a reluctance to forgo its potential. Internationally research with military applicability is ongoing. Defense-led research funding is one of the drivers of neuroscience research aiming to understand thought, consciousness, and memory, the very basis of individuality and sociality. International military interest in this area of research is diverse, from enhancement of cognitive abilities to psychological damage suffered as a consequence of war ﬁghting. However, important ethical questions about the source of funding and the impact, choice, and direction of research and technological development need to be explicitly addressed.

Conclusion

The changing nature of conﬂict and advances in technology and knowledge have been used to rationalize the use of chemical and biological weapons as humane and claims that their use amounts to a humanitarian necessity.

Advances in our understanding of, for example, psychopharmacology and neuroscience do not only avail new methods to treat disorders and devise medical interventions but also raise the specter of misuse. In the hands of malevolent actors, this knowledge has the potential to make available tools of unprecedented coercion, repression, and subjugation.

Conceived in this way the central question is about state power and the types of weapons at its disposal to enforce a monopoly of force and the type of force that is considered legitimate. The narrative of CBW as a humanitarian alternative allows certain areas of research, development, and use of CBW to become acceptable and even more vigorously pursued. The humanitarian argument carries sinister humanitarian and, thus, bioethical implications: appropriation of chemical and biological technologies for hostile ends and legitimization of CBW.

To ensure the continued durability of the prohibitions requires engagement with the ethical dimension of chemical and biological weapons in terms of potential capabilities inherent in the exploitation of life sciences to manipulate life processes at the molecular and system level.

Ethical questions addressing and examining the choice and direction of technological pathways are required to ensure the peaceful exploitation of life sciences for societal beneﬁt and to critically engage with questions of utility, permissibility, legitimacy, and acceptability of certain hostile applications.

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