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

question 12

True/False

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.
-Some utilitarians concede that well-being and justice sometimes conflict, but when they do, it is justice and not well-being that must take a backseat.

---

Definitions:

Percentage

A proportion or share in relation to a whole, represented as a fraction of 100.

Myelination

The process of forming a myelin sheath around the nerve fibers to increase the speed at which information travels from nerve to nerve.

Neural Communication

The process by which nerve cells (neurons) transmit signals to each other and to other types of cells throughout the nervous system.

Synaptic Pruning

The process by which extra neurons and synaptic connections are eliminated in order to increase the efficiency of neuronal transmissions in the brain.