Life and Thought
Russ Shafer-Landau is an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a leading figure in contemporary metaethics, known especially for his defense of moral realism and his critique of moral skepticism.
Russ Shafer-Landau was born in 1963. He studied at Brown University and completed his PhD in philosophy at the University of Arizona under the supervision of Joel Feinberg.
Shafer-Landau taught at the University of Kansas from 1992 to 2002 and joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2002. There he taught philosophy and served as chair of the philosophy department. After a brief period at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he returned to Wisconsin.
His main areas of work are metaethics, ethical theory, and normative philosophy. Shafer-Landau is a prominent defender of moral realism, arguing in his works that objective moral truths exist and that moral judgments can be true or false.
Among his major works are Moral Realism: A Defence, The Fundamentals of Ethics, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?, and The Ethical Life. He is the founder and editor of the Oxford Studies in Metaethics series and served as president of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association from 2020 to 2021.