QUESTION TEXT: Philosopher: Nations are not literally persons; they…
QUESTION TYPE: Complete the Argument
CONCLUSION: A nation’s survival requires that many of its citizens have false beliefs. [Prephrased conclusion]
REASONING:
- Nation survive ➞ Sacrifices by citizens ➞ many citizens believe nation has moral rights and responsibilities
- Nations do not have moral rights and responsibilities.
ANALYSIS: The stimulus has the following structure: two conditional statements are joined together and we can draw a conclusion @nation survive ➞ many citizens believe nation has moral rights and responsibilities@. Then as a fact, the stimulus says “nations do not have moral rights”.
So we can say that the necessary condition refers to a false belief. So, the survival of the nation has as a necessary condition “citizens have a false belief [that nations have moral rights]”.
___________
- The argument clearly says that nothing else could prompt citizens to make sacrifices. The “nothing else” refers to the false belief that nations have moral rights and responsibilities.
- CORRECT. This is the conclusion the argument is leading to. It is false that nations have moral rights and responsibilities.Yet nations’ survival requires that citizens have the belief that they do.
- The philosopher never mentions what we can target with moral blame or praise. (Maybe you can blame a nation even if that nation doesn’t have moral responsibilities)
- The author doesn’t say which sacrifices are worthwhile. The concept never comes up in the argument.
- The author didn’t say this. They might agree that for simplicity of argument it may make sense to think of nations as people. E.g. if you say “The US and China concluded a trade agreement”, you are conceiving of the two nations as something like a person. The author wouldn’t necessarily agree this is a bad thing to do in this case.
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