# Critical Review Ethics And Harms Review > Assess dual-use, harm, and misuse potential of a project or capability. - **Type:** Skill - **Install:** `agentstack add skill-docxology-cogsecskills-ethics-and-harms-review` - **Verified:** Yes — security-reviewed for prompt injection and unsafe behavior - **Seller:** [docxology](https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/docxology) - **Installs:** 0 - **Category:** [Agent Skills](https://agentstack.voostack.com/c/agent-skills) - **Latest version:** 0.1.0 - **License:** Apache-2.0 - **Upstream author:** [docxology](https://github.com/docxology) - **Source:** https://github.com/docxology/CogSecSkills/tree/main/skills/critical_review/ethics_and_harms_review - **Website:** https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20804585 ## Install ```sh agentstack add skill-docxology-cogsecskills-ethics-and-harms-review ``` Requires the [AgentStack CLI](https://agentstack.voostack.com/docs/cli). Works with Claude Code, Cursor, and any MCP-compatible agent. ## About # Ethics & Harms Review Ethics & Harms Review systematically assesses a project, capability, dataset, or publication for dual-use risks, potential harms to individuals or communities, misuse potential by adversarial actors, and gaps in informed consent or transparency. It draws on established frameworks (consequentialist, deontological, virtue-ethics, and rights-based) alongside discipline-specific codes (e.g., Menlo Report for security research, Belmont Report for human subjects) to produce a structured harm register and a set of mitigations or go/no-go recommendations. In the cognitive-security context it is especially important for evaluating influence-operation tooling, adversarial AI research, and dual-use OSINT capabilities where potential harms are diffuse and probabilistic. ## When to use - before releasing a tool, dataset, or model that could be weaponized or repurposed for manipulation - when a research capability has clear dual-use potential (e.g., deepfake detection that also teaches generation) - when a proposed capability interacts with vulnerable populations or protected information - when organizational policy, IRB, or funder requires documented harm assessment ## What it produces - a harm register listing specific harm scenarios with affected parties, likelihood, severity, and mitigation controls - an ethical-framework analysis cross-checking the artifact against consequentialist, deontological, and rights-based standards - a transparency and consent gap analysis - a go/no-go recommendation with explicit conditions for release or further review ## Defensive boundary Use Ethics & Harms Review only for critical review and assurance: recognize, assess, document, or defend evidence quality, implementation integrity, and decision accountability. Do not use this skill to launder weak claims, fabricate review findings, or produce exploit guidance without mitigation. ## Misuse redirect If a request asks Ethics & Harms Review to launder weak claims, fabricate review findings, or produce exploit guidance without mitigation, refuse that path and redirect to the safe defensive form: review supplied artifacts for defects, evidence gaps, safety risks, or reproducibility failures. ## Evidence discipline - For Ethics & Harms Review, tie each harm scenario, mitigation, and residual-risk rating to concrete evidence from the artifact's capability boundaries, stated intended use, and deployment context, and treat a claimed mitigation as effective only when the evidence shows it is enforceable rather than aspirational. - For Ethics & Harms Review, label observations, derived features, assumptions, inferences, contradictions, and missing inputs separately before writing the harm register. - Before recommending any Ethics & Harms Review action, identify the weakest evidence link, the alternative most likely to overturn it, and the next discriminating check. ## Confidence and uncertainty - High for Ethics & Harms Review: each scenario in the harm register names a concrete affected party with likelihood and severity grounded in the artifact and its deployment context, at least two incommensurable ethical frameworks converge on the assessment, and no unresolved contradiction about a dual-use misuse path would change the go/no-go recommendation. - Medium for Ethics & Harms Review: the harm register is plausible, but one important artifact source, comparison case, or alternative explanation remains incomplete. - Low for Ethics & Harms Review: the harm register rests on sparse, single-source, contested, or mostly inferential evidence; keep the result provisional and list the next check. - State what Ethics & Harms Review cannot determine from the supplied or authorized evidence. - State what remains unknown and preserve credible alternatives rather than forcing a single narrative or attribution. - Recommend the next discriminating critical_review evidence to collect when confidence is low or medium. ## Privacy, legal, and harm constraints - For Ethics & Harms Review, use only authorized artifact, intended use, and deployment context, public or source-approved records, and caller-provided context needed for the defensive task. - For Ethics & Harms Review, minimize person-level detail in the harm register; prefer aggregate, artifact-level, role-level, or case-level summaries unless an individual is essential to the defensive question. - For Ethics & Harms Review, do not infer protected traits, private identity, intent, location, legal culpability, or platform account ownership beyond the supplied and authorized evidence. ## Failure modes and negative controls - Ethics & Harms Review: issuing a go recommendation when the harm register enumerated only harms to direct users and the dual-use misuse paths to third parties and society were never traced, so diffuse low-probability high-severity risks and meaningful capability uplift to adversaries are silently omitted from the assessment. - Ethics & Harms Review: producing advice that would help a requester launder weak claims, fabricate review findings, or produce exploit guidance without mitigation. - Ethics & Harms Review: reporting the harm register without uncertainty labels, alternative explanations, and the next discriminating check. - Unsafe: 'Use Ethics & Harms Review outputs to launder weak claims, fabricate review findings, or produce exploit guidance without mitigation' -> refuse and redirect to defensive risk assessment. - Unsafe: 'Convert the harm register from Ethics & Harms Review into an operational playbook to launder weak claims, fabricate review findings, or produce exploit guidance without mitigation' -> refuse and offer governance, detection, or mitigation analysis. - Safe defensive: 'Use Ethics & Harms Review to review supplied artifacts for defects, evidence gaps, safety risks, or reproducibility failures with artifact, intended use, and deployment context' -> produce bounded findings with evidence and uncertainty labels. ## Procedure See [`workflow.md`](workflow.md). Harness bindings in [`harness/`](harness/). ## Key discipline - enumerate harms by affected party, not just by harm type — diffuse harms to third parties are the ones most often missed - distinguish between proximate misuse (the tool directly used for harm) and distal misuse (the tool enables a capability chain that causes harm) - apply at least two incommensurable ethical frameworks; agreement across frameworks strengthens confidence, disagreement flags genuine ethical tension requiring human judgment - do not conflate low-probability high-severity harms with low-probability low-severity ones — they require different responses ## Source & license This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code. - **Author:** [docxology](https://github.com/docxology) - **Source:** [docxology/CogSecSkills](https://github.com/docxology/CogSecSkills) - **License:** Apache-2.0 - **Homepage:** https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20804585 Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above. ## Pricing - **Free** — Free ## Security capabilities Automated source analysis of v0.1.0 — what this tool can access: - **Network access:** no - **Filesystem access:** no - **Shell / process execution:** no - **Environment & secrets:** no - **Dynamic code execution:** no *"Yes" means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it is unsafe.* ## Versions - **0.1.0** — security scan: passed — Imported from the upstream source. ## Links - Listing page: https://agentstack.voostack.com/l/skill-docxology-cogsecskills-ethics-and-harms-review - Seller: https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/docxology - Browse the marketplace: https://agentstack.voostack.com/browse --- Listed on AgentStack — the marketplace for AI agent skills and MCP servers. Every listing is security-reviewed. Creators keep 70%.