61 pages • 2 hours read
Russ Shafer LandauThe Fundamentals of Ethics
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Russ Shafer-Landau
Author Russ Shafer-Landau is an American philosopher. He graduated from Brown University and obtained his doctorate from the University of Arizona. He was taught by Joel Feinberg, a legal philosopher famous for his work The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (1984-1988). Shafer-Landau taught at the University of Kansas between 1992 and 2002 and is presently a professor of ethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Shafer-Landau is the founder of Oxford Studies in Metaethics, an annual scholarly periodical dedicated to publishing outstanding recent works in the field. He also founded the Madison Metaethics Workshop (MadMeta), an annual forum for the discussion of new works in metaethics. For one year between 2020 and 2021, Shafer-Landau served as the Central President of the American Philosophical Association. He is a staunch proponent of non-naturalistic moral realism, which rejects the idea that ethical statements can, at their core, be understood through natural terms. This is a perspective he has defended in his work Moral Realism: A Defence. Shafer-Landau’s works underline the necessity of rational thought in ethics. The Fundamentals of Ethics is his second publication aimed toward a student audience. His first, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?, is a primer on metaethics in which Shafer-Landau ultimately defends the idea of moral objectivity.
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was an English philosopher most famous for his defense of hedonism and utilitarianism. He was a proponent of classical liberalism and made one of the most recognizable pronouncements of utilitarianism: “the greatest good for the greatest number” (123). His predecessor and mentor Jeremy Bentham is the founder of modern utilitarianism. However, their outlook on the nature of hedonistic pleasure differs. Unlike Bentham, Mill believed in different qualities of pleasure, with physical enjoyment at the bottom of the scale and intellectual happiness at the top. This argument is detailed in his most famous published work, Utilitarianism (1861), which popularized the theory beyond English philosophical circles.
Mill is among one of the few philosophers of the 19th century to defend women’s rights. His essay The Subjection of Women is considered as an early work on feminism. Additionally, he has published works in the field of political philosophy and covered topics such as social liberty, liberty, freedom of speech, and the tyranny of the majority.
Immanuel Kant
German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is one of the most important thinkers of the Enlightenment period. He is best known for being the founder of Kantian ethics, although he also wrote at length about rationalism and transcendental idealism. His three publications in moral philosophy, Grounding for the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797), defend moral duty as a categorical imperative.
Kant’s religious views are uncertain, but his moral theories have been accused by later philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche of being overly theological. His earlier works on race have also been heavily criticized for defending scientific racism. Kant’s negative outlook on race changed in Perpetual Pace: A Philosophical Sketch, in which he defends the idea of international dialogue and cooperation as the ultimate arbiters of democratic peace. Beyond ethics, Kant wrote on epistemology, aesthetics, and political philosophy.
Thomas Hobbes
English thinker Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is considered one of the founders of modern political philosophy. He is best known for the formulation of the social contract theory in his work Leviathan (1651). Inspired by modern scientific developments and a mechanistic understanding of human nature, Hobbes envisioned a world without government. He called this the state of nature, where humans would compete for resources against each other in an environment of lawlessness. The social contract is a mutual agreement to establish a civil society that solves the problem of the state of nature and introduces the concept of moral duties (overseen by a governing body) to regulate individual behavior. This procedural approach to moral philosophy remains highly relevant to this day.
Although still debated among contemporary scholars, Hobbesian ethics seem to veer toward ethical egoism, the belief that an act is morally correct if it fulfills one’s self-interests. This is seen in several passages in Leviathan. Beyond philosophy, Hobbes wrote in the fields of history, theology, geometry, and jurisprudence.
