The Marie Skłodowska-Curie action “VaViM: Virtues and Vice in Mathematics” looks at (some of) the ethical dimensions of the production of mathematical knowledge. The project addresses what kind of mathematical knowledge is produced and who gets to produce it. These are societally relevant questions because mathematical knowledge permeates our human lives: it shapes our social media feeds in the form of algorithms, it features in the development of militaristic technologies, and mathematical ability functions as an indicator of intellectual excellence. Furthermore, despite narratives about the objectivity of mathematical reasoning, what counts as new, relevant, significant, and worthy content is partially determined in the social processes of mathematical research activity, such as funding decisions, peer review, or collaborative efforts, which are prone to biases and exclusionary mechanisms. The ethics of mathematics thus has to do not only with how and where mathematical knowledge is applied to the world, but also with how it is produced and who is involved in these processes.
Mathematical communities are starting to pay more attention to the ethical dimensions of their research activities. They debate issues of social justice in mathematical research practices and point out that mathematics students are ill-prepared for the ethical challenges they will face when working as bankers, writers of computer codes etc. These are socially relevant questions that merit philosophical engagement, but philosophers have thus far largely ignored the ethical dimensions of mathematical knowledge-making. A primary objective of VaViM is to address this lacuna. The project provides detailed case study based arguments that reveal and discuss these ethical dimensions of the production of mathematical knowledge, and proposes concrete interventions to navigate these challenges. The project studies forms of exclusion from mathematical knowledge-making activities. Some forms of exclusion are justified, such as filtering processes that seek to ensure quality of mathematical research. Other forms of exclusion are unjustified, such as the evaluation of mathematical work based on epistemically irrelevant social identifiers (e.g. race, gender, geographic location). VaViM studies both forms of exclusion from mathematical knowledge-making.
