Unit quiz: Desert, testimony, and the limits of legitimate authority

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5 questions · 80% to pass · no timer. This quiz checks the lessons in this unit. 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 regulator is told that a surgeon’s exceptional earnings rest on a talent developed through training her family paid for, and that she works unusually long hours. Which argument bears most directly on whether she deserves her share?The regress argument, since both the native endowment and the opportunity to develop it were unchosen, which threatens desert at its foundation rather than at the level of measurementThe option-set objection, since the choiceworthiness of a position does not justify the range of positions available to the chooser

Question 2

A housing authority accepts complaints only through an online form offering the grounds ‘noise’, ‘pest’, and ‘structural’. Residents want to report persistent damp that they attribute to a nearby excavation, and their submissions are returned as unclassifiable. Which injustice does the process display?Testimonial injustice, since the residents’ reports receive a credibility deficit attributable to prejudice against them as a groupHermeneutical injustice, since the shared categories cannot express what the residents are experiencing, so the failure lies in the interpretive resources rather than in any hearer’s prejudice

Question 3

A licensing scheme restricts entry to a trade, and the justification offered is that entrants should be inducted into the profession’s shared culture. Evaluate the authority claim.The scope of the authority exceeds the justification, and the appeal to a shared culture raises the neutrality objection, since conformity with the reasons that already apply to entrants does not require the cultureThe scheme lacks authority for all entrants, since any restriction on entry requires the consent of those it excludes

Question 4

Two colleagues equal in evidence and competence disagree about a technical question. One of them subsequently notices a procedural error in her own reasoning that does not alter the substantive data on either side. What follows?The disagreement is now settled in her colleague’s favour, since an acknowledged procedural error shows that her conclusion was falseAn undercutting defeater has appeared, so confidence should fall until she can estimate the error’s effect, even though no counter-argument was offered against her conclusion

Question 5

A ministry requires a risk-scoring instrument to be calibrated within each affected group and to have equal false positive rates, and the vendor promises that a larger and more representative dataset will deliver both, although the groups have different base rates for the outcome. Evaluate the promise.The trade-off is structural, so no dataset will deliver both conditions when the base rates differ, and the requirement must be revised to state which criterion is chosen and whyThe trade-off reflects data quality, so a larger and more representative sample will normally allow both conditions to hold at once

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