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

question 9

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.
-According to virtue ethics, the central task in morality is knowing and applying principles.

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Definitions:

Pollen Tube

A tube that forms from a pollen grain and grows toward the ovule to enable sperm to pass directly to an egg for fertilization in plants.

Diploid

An organism or cell that contains two complete sets of chromosomes, one from each parent.

Sporophyte Generation

One of the two alternating phases in the life cycles of plants and algae, characterized by a multicellular diploid phase that produces spores.

Angiosperms

Flowering plants that produce seeds enclosed within a fruit; the largest group of land plants.