Cumulative level test: Persons, reasons, and legitimate power: consciousness, responsibility, desert, and epistemic justice

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12 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.

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Question 1

A tribunal reasons that a claimant cannot be a reliable witness to her own past because her self-account has changed over the years and she refuses to narrate the earlier period as her own. Diagnose the reasoning with the tools of this level.It converts an ideal of narrativity into a test of identity while imposing a credibility deficit on the claimant for failing to produce the self-account the tribunal expects, which are two separate errors with separate remediesIt assumes that personal identity comes in degrees and that the claimant’s account is fictional rather than merely selective

Question 2

A student argues, first, that because no amount of physical detail entails experience, dualism is established, and second, that because a functionally identical duplicate without experience can be conceived, such a duplicate is possible. Assess both steps.Neither step needs further support, since the conceivability of a duplicate that is physically identical to a conscious being entails its possibilityEach step converts an epistemic gap into a metaphysical conclusion, and each therefore needs an additional premise linking what can be conceived or explained to what exists

Question 3

An agent acts from her own settled reasons after deliberating as she normally does, and a device stands ready to compel her if she had wavered, so that she could not have acted otherwise. A colleague argues that blame is therefore misplaced. Evaluate.The colleague makes the leeway condition necessary for responsibility, which the sourcehood cases challenge, since the action flowed from the agent’s own reasons and the alternative was never neededThe colleague is right, because responsibility requires that the agent could have done otherwise in the situation, so any blocked alternative exculpates

Question 4

A legislator argues that people should bear the costs of their own bad choices and that unchosen disadvantages should be equalised. Which two objections from this level most directly threaten the position?The desert objection, since only contributions can ground a claim to a share, and the sufficiency objection, since only a floor mattersThe regress objection, since the capacity to choose well is itself a product of unchosen conditions, and the option-set objection, since a choice made from an unjustified range of alternatives does not settle the justice of the outcome

Question 5

Consider two flawed arguments. The first treats a threat of punishment as though it showed that the threatened person has an admirable character. The second attributes to an opponent a crude version of a view the opponent states with qualifications. Name the diagnosis for each.The first has a wrong-kind-of-reason problem, since the incentive bears on holding the attitude rather than on the object, and the second fails the principle of charityThe first commits the internalist fallacy by ignoring the agent’s motivational set, and the second is a reductio of the opponent’s position

Question 6

A state justifies a compulsory biometric registry by appeal to administrative efficiency in benefits and taxation. Residents in one district object that their records have repeatedly been wrong and that the objection procedure requires them to prove a negative. Assess the justification and the objection.The efficiency claim justifies the registry in every domain it touches, because administrative reasons preempt individual judgment wherever the state actsThe efficiency claim supports authority over the administrative domain it improves, while the objection identifies a credibility and interpretive failure that the efficiency argument does not answer, so the two claims must be met separately

Question 7

Which claim about authority can a philosophical anarchist accept along with a defender of the service conception?That an exercise of power may be justified with respect to those subject to it without any particular person having a standing obligation to obey itThat a justified state has a general claim on the obedience of everyone within its territory, which anarchism denies only for unjust states

Question 8

A position dossier states a verdict at moderate confidence and lists one counter-argument. It includes no assessment of the author’s own reasoning and no statement of what would change her mind. What is missing, and why does it matter?Nothing material is missing, since a verdict and a counter-argument are jointly sufficient for a contested questionIt omits higher-order evidence about the reliability of the author’s own reasoning and omits the exit condition, so the dossier cannot be assessed for responsiveness to evidence and cannot be audited later

Question 9

Which pair of claims should a capstone defend about the tension among group-wise calibration, equal false positive rates, and equal false negative rates?That the tension is a structural property of predictors when base rates differ, and that the resulting choice among error distributions must be stated and justified by a legitimacy argumentThat the tension is an artefact of incomplete data, and that a sufficiently large sample removes the need to choose among the criteria

Question 10

An agent’s entire self-understanding, including the narrative she tells about her commitments, was installed by others before she could evaluate it. She now acts on it deliberately. How do the manipulation argument and the narrative view bear on this case?They are independent, since narrativity concerns self-understanding while manipulation concerns causation, and no question about origin can bear on eitherThey pull in different directions: the manipulation argument treats the installed origin as bearing on responsibility, while the narrative view asks whether the story satisfies the reality constraint and is one she can inhabit, so an installed story can be a real self-understanding even when its origin is rigged

Question 11

An agency accepts the output of an opaque predictive model as though it were testimony from a competent source, and denies any wrong on the ground that a program is not a person. Assess that reasoning.The reasoning mistakes the locus of the wrong: the injustice falls on the people whose grounds cannot be examined and contested, and treating the model as a testifier shifts the burden onto subjects who cannot discharge itThe reasoning is sound, since epistemic injustice requires a prejudiced human hearer and therefore cannot arise from a purely mechanical process

Question 12

Once the arithmetic of base rates has fixed the menu of error distributions available to a policy, what remains to be decided, and by what argument?Which criterion minimises total error, since the legitimate criterion is by definition the one with the smallest aggregate errorWhich distribution may be imposed on which population and in which domain, decided by the justification of the state’s authority rather than by the arithmetic

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