The Fundamentals of Ethics

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.