Ethical Engagement with Mathematics: How Practices of Mathematics Create Moral Orders that Govern Modern Souls Under Conditions of Modernity?

This paper combines traditions of critical mathematics education, critical science, and technology studies to articulate how human souls are being domesticated in the image of calculated practices based on mathematics-economic-techno-scientific rationalities in modern societies. Here, mathematics (whether pure or applied) has become a dominant discipline that could act as a pedagogical tool for creating not only the conditions for the modern soul to become the modern calculated soul (within the enterprise regime of capitalism) but also a variety of criteria for regulating the modern soul with an ever-increasing lust for measurement and standardization. Calculated processes based on mathematics (as part of a techno-science nexus with a foundational claim for objectivity) are being projected as sustaining current modern society through the realized abstraction of mathematics. Despite their enormous benefits, these developments of modernity are formatted by performances of various techno-science practices, resulting in greatly damaging effects. This is visible, for example, in actions producing destructive military tools such as nuclear energy and in negative industrial consequences of climate change. These negative actions now lead to the possible extinction of the Earth as a biosphere. At the individual level, people are becoming more alienated and reified as abstract objects that can be optimized. This is like optimizing an object (under a capitalist regime of technologies of self-governance) or thing through mathematics and techno-scientific actions, as it is exhibited with ubiquity in modern societies.