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

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.