Cumulative level test: Normative ethics: principles, objections and public decisions

Check understanding, separately from reading

10 questions · 80% to pass · no timer. This longer test revisits both units in the level. These authored questions assess recognition and application of the taught distinctions, not professional qualification. You may review the lessons and retry. Repeat attempts reuse the question bank; a remembered answer is not proof of transfer to a new situation.

Saving a lesson records reading only. Previous lesson completions have not been converted into passing scores. You can continue reading without a pass; the assessment remains unpassed.

Question 1

A fabricated charitable report could attract donations now but damage trust when discovered. An act analysis must count those downstream risks. A rule analysis asks what happens under a practice permitting such fabrication, not just whether this isolated deception seems profitable. Both can oppose the lie for differently structured reasons.

Question 2

Consider obtaining money by promising repayment while intending never to repay. If false promises became the accepted policy whenever money was wanted, the reliance that makes promising useful would be undermined. The criticism targets exploiting a practice while adopting a maxim incompatible with its universal operation.

Question 3

A tutor openly offers lessons at an agreed fee: both parties pursue ends through cooperation. A tutor hides a material limitation to secure payment prevents the learner from making an informed choice. The learner becomes a tool of the tutor’s plan rather than a participant able to assess it.

Question 4

You promised a friend routine help but encounter someone needing urgent assistance. The emergency may outweigh fidelity to the appointment. The promise still supplies a reason to notify your friend, apologize, or rearrange help. That residual responsibility distinguishes overriding a duty from declaring it never mattered.

Question 5

Compare warning residents before necessary demolition, while accepting unavoidable inconvenience, with deliberately frightening residents because fear is the chosen method of making them leave. In the second plan fear is instrumental, not merely foreseen. This establishes a means/side-effect distinction; it alone does not settle either action’s permissibility.

Question 6

A caretaker notices a hazard within the area they are responsible for and could safely remove it. Saying “I did not create it” identifies an omission rather than a harmful act, but leaves the role-based protective duty untouched. Compare an uninvolved stranger with no knowledge of the hazard: responsibility differs for additional reasons.

Question 7

Two equally careless drivers behave identically, but only one encounters a pedestrian who is injured. Both were reckless; only one caused that injury. It is coherent to distinguish equal culpability for carelessness from unequal duties of compensation, while recognizing that ordinary blame often responds strongly to the outcome.

Question 8

A proposed institution imposes a severe, avoidable burden on one member for tiny conveniences to many others. A contractualist asks whether that member has a reasonable complaint against the principle compared with alternatives. Counting beneficiaries alone does not yet answer the person who bears the concentrated burden.

Question 9

You endorse equal treatment, then judge that accessible formats should differ by need. Rather than discarding either immediately, refine equality toward fair access and test that principle on resource constraints and other cases. Also ask whether your starting judgments reflect familiarity or prejudice, and examine a serious rival principle.

Question 10

A library can expand standard materials or fund accessible formats. First distinguish demand evidence from assumptions. Next compare gains and exclusions, examine equal-access duties, and state the strongest complaint from people facing either shortage. A justified recommendation might prioritize a basic accessible collection while specifying a review of unmet demand; the example does not establish a universal budget formula.

Continuing does not mark this assessment passed.