Russ Shafer-Landau Is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

question 13

Multiple Choice

Russ Shafer-Landau is professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of several books including The Fundamentals of Ethics, fourth edition (2017) and The Ethical Life, fourth edition (2017) . He is also the editor of Oxford Studies in Metaethics. In this reading he reviews some common criticisms of utilitarianism and argues that although some of them are less than decisive, others pose serious problems for the theory. Utilitarianism's most crippling shortcomings are its insistence that there is no intrinsic wrongness (or rightness) and its requirement that we must maximize well-being even if justice is thwarted.
-Shafer-Landau says that the impartiality required by utilitarianism is

• A) a substantial drawback of the theory.
• B) a perversion of moral theory.
• C) a mark against the theory.
• D) a substantial benefit of the theory.

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Definitions:

Strong Acids

Acids that completely dissociate into their ions in water, significantly increasing the concentration of hydrogen ions in a solution.

Reduced

Reduced typically refers to a chemical reaction in which atoms gain electrons, or in a broader sense, the diminishment in size, amount, or intensity of something.

Acid

Substances that release hydrogen ions (H+) when dissolved in water, characterized by their sour taste and the ability to turn litmus paper red.

Oxidized

The state of a molecule that has lost electrons, often associated with a gain of oxygen or loss of hydrogen.