This past week, the University of Akron’s Philosophy Club, invited Dr. Neil Sinhababu to come speak at UA. Dr. Niel is 36 years old. He is from Lawrence, Kansas. Dr. Neil earned his BA from Harvard in 2001 and his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. Currently Dr. Neil is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. Dr. Sinhababu came to the University of Akron to give a presentation on a theory of ethics and then discuss it with students.
The presentation was perfectly laid out. Dr. Neil gave his presentation and then allowed equal time for questions and comments afterwards. I approached him after the Q&A asking if he would mind me writing an article on him. Dr. Neil was very willing and emailed me later with answers to a few questions.
“I've given over 50 lectures in countries including the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several places in Asia over the last six months. I left Singapore in April 2016, and I'll be traveling on this lecture tour until August 2017.” This past week he spoke at Kent State, the University of Akron and said Cleveland State is one of his next stops. Dr. Neil gives presentations on his research and publications he is currently working on.
Dr. Sinhababu presented us with the theory of Scalar Consequentialism which “is the view that the rightness and wrongness of actions comes in degrees which are determined by the goodness or badness of the actions' consequences” - Dr. Neil.
Think of it this way. In language, we have a sort of continuum for certain words. We can have something that is good, but another thing can be better and then yet another can be the best of the three. In the same way, we have bad, worse and worst. The view he presented states that the same principle can be applied to write and wrong, even though “righter” and “wronger” do not seem grammatically sound. This is how Dr. Neil presented it to us.
Dr. Neil went on to say in his email “We can know that pleasure is good and pain is bad because we know how they feel, and that's the most reliable knowledge we have about anything in morality. So I accept a utilitarian ethics based on the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain. This provides a straightforward way to explain the rightness or wrongness of actions in terms of whether they cause pleasure or displeasure for everyone.”
According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a peer-reviewed academic resource, “Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories. Like other forms of consequentialism, its core idea is that whether actions are morally right or wrong depends on their effects. More specifically, the only effects of actions that are relevant are the good and bad results that they produce. A key point in this article concerns the distinction between individual actions and types of actions. Act utilitarians focus on the effects of individual actions (such as John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln) while rule utilitarians focus on the effects of types of actions (such as killing or stealing) (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
This is very different from the Deontological theory of ethics. “The word deontology derives from the Greek words for duty (deon) and science (or study) of (logos). In contemporary moral philosophy, deontology is one of those kinds of normative theories regarding which choices are morally required, forbidden, or permitted. In other words, deontology falls within the domain of moral theories that guide and assess our choices of what we ought to do (deontic theories), in contrast to (aretaic [virtue] theories) that—fundamentally, at least—guide and assess what kind of person (in terms of character traits) we are and should be. And within that domain, deontologists—those who subscribe to deontological theories of morality—stand in opposition to consequentialists” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). There are also deontological theories that look at actions on a scalar view.
I would like to again thank Dr. Neil Sinhababu for coming to the University of Akron to talk to students and for allowing me to write this. Check out his website at http://www.neilsinhababu.com/.
