During past decades, life sciences research has profoundly affected our view of ourselves as human beings. WP7 is dedicated to assessing the societal and ethical dimensions of microbiome research in general and the work within the IHMCSA consortium in particular. In Chapter 1, we will address the implications for microbiome research for our self-understanding as humans from a philosophical anthropological angle. This entails a mutual exposure or confrontation between microbiome research and philosophical anthropology, building on the holobiont concept. In Chapter 2, building on this, we will zoom in on the interaction of task 7.1 with other tasks and work-packages, e.g., on mutual learning between microbiome research and the humanities. Chapter 3 outlines important ethical and governance aspects of microbiome research and its applications, such as responsible promise management and the challenge of defining a healthy microbiome. The latter is taken up in Chapter 4. An important aspect of microbiome research and its ethical implications amounts to defining a “healthy” or “normal” microbiome, but while it may seem obvious that microbiome self-management and self-care strive to improve the health of our microbiome, the question how to define and determine microbiome health proves a challenge. We outline an understanding of microbiome health which moves beyond a compositional approach (adopted in most diagnostic tools for consumers) towards an understanding in terms of function, care, and relationship, in line with the holobiont concept introduced in Chapter 1. Informed by these insights, Chapter 5 (the most extensive chapter) zooms in on ethical issues of microbiome self-management. Here we will notably present and discuss the results of a mutual learning workshop entitled Our Microbial Selves organised in September 2022 (IHMCSA Milestone 14). Finally, we will recapitulate our results as input for task 7.2: the regulatory challenges of self-management tools addressed in more detail in D7.2.