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Intent is a fundamental concern within ethics
a) Do good intentions, or…
Intent is a fundamental concern within ethics
a) Do good intentions, or the lack of bad intentions, absolve producers of mathematical knowledge from responsibility for the application of knowledge?
b) what criteria might we use when considering intentions and who would decide those criteria?
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social and political context, never in value-free isolation; our professional world is always
potentially ethical. Thus, all mathematicians must think about their individual responsibility, as
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tool and can be used for good, and for purposes that are not so good. The mathematician may not
be doing the harm, but he is making the tools that someone else is using for harm.
Pure mathematics may not find applications for decades or longer,
and it is obviously hard for its practitioners to feel the ethical weight of consequences that emerge
long after their lifetime. But this is not uniformly the case, and the potential long term nonapplicability of some mathematics does not absolve the mathematician of ethical responsibility:
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to consider the possibility, and even the purest of mathematicians at this level can be sensitive to
this possibility. After all, a parent cannot totally control the actions of the child they have raised
to adolescence, and nor should they be expected to by that point; the child has taken on its own
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the child, or to let it carry on in a wild way; a responsible parent would still attempt to intervene,
provide counsel, give guidance, and even perhaps warn others if the adolescent has the obvious
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