Benedict Taylor-Green

Postdoctoral Affiliate

Ben was awarded his DPhil in Anthropology from the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME), University of Oxford in early 2023. His doctoral thesis, Empathic Predators: On the Affects and Optics of Brain-Computer Interface Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Research is a pioneering philosophical anthropological inquiry concerning the dual use problem in international brain-computer interface (BCI) research.

The thesis makes use of scientific papers as qualitative data, by taking literature on brain-computer interface unmanned aerial vehicle (BCIUAV) research as its anchor. A small number of digital interviews with BCI researchers were also conducted. The dual use problem involves research, technology, and artefacts with an ambivalent moral valence, in terms of the uses to which they can be put; crucially, where one of the uses entails weapons innovation. In BCIUAV research, the problem is represented by the proposals for future uses of the BCIUAV as an assistive technology for people with severe disabilities, and as an electronic neuroweapon for use in armed conflict. The conceptual and normative basis for the approach taken to dual use is found in the work of philosopher John Forge, and the cosmopolitan anthropology of Nigel Rapport. The research and technology are examined over several chapters and special attention is eventually paid to the ways authors of some BCIUAV research papers figure bodies of future users in their texts. Speculative analyses are conducted concerning the way in which some figured bodies might function as morally persuasive optical devices, manipulating the reader’s perceptions of the research and technology in question. The thesis flows towards a consideration of the Human Right to Life with relation to knowingly dual use and weapons research, but also with relation to the practice of anthropology itself. It is argued that knowingly dual use and/or weapons research constitutes an indiscriminate threat to the Right to Life of Anyone and is thus a fundamental contravention of ‘cosmopolitan politesse’ (Rapport 2012); and that a justifiably moralizing anthropology capable of critique and intervention can be founded on respect for the Human Right to Life.

In postdoctoral research, Ben aims to further investigate awareness of and attitudes to dual use and neuroweapons research among the BCI community, with the aim of better understanding the situation from BCI researchers’ perspectives, and with a cautiously optimistic, humanistic anthropological view to discouraging such practices in the long-term with the support of concerned members.

The ever expanding list of Ben’s research interests currently include: the problem of dual use and weapons research in science and engineering; ethics in BCI research and technology; applied anthropology; moral anthropology and the morality and ethics of anthropology; cosmopolitanism in anthropology and beyond; human rights; Immanuel Kant’s political writings; science and technology studies; philosophical anthropology; visual anthropology; the anthropology of Alfred Gell; abduction in C.S. Peirce and beyond, education in anthropology and beyond, the literal and figural prosthetic and the changing human style, anti-natalist philosophy, class-based prejudice and discrimination in higher educational environments, artificial intelligence, and far more.

Ben was teaching assistant on the Ethnographic Portraiture (now called ‘Multi-Modal Tool Kit’) methods course at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography from 2020-2022 alongside Dr Paola Esposito and has conducted undergraduate tutorials in Social Analysis for second-year undergraduate students reading for the BA in Archaeology and Anthropology at St Peter’s College, Oxford.

He also holds a MSc (Distinction) in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology from the University of Oxford, and a BSc (Hons) (1:1) in Anthropology and Philosophy from Oxford Brookes University. His DPhil was generously funded by SAME’s Doctoral Scholarship Award and supervised by Professor David Zeitlyn.