If an external force intervenes

Answer choices

1. A

   Word Salad1% picked this

   Political freedom is a virtue that a community can attain through

   This answer is literally just grabbing words from throughout the paragraph and creating a brand new meaning with them. The author never called political freedom a virtue, for example.

   1%
2. B

   Weaker Match6% picked this

   Self-determination is not the first political virtue that the members of a community achieve in their

   This does feel like an inference we can pull out of the author's argument. If the author thinks it's during the struggle to become free that these other values have the best chance of arising, it sounds like some of these virtues arrive before the people's struggle to become free (to have self-determination) has been fully realized. But this answer is lost within the premise. It doesn't seem to connect the premise to the conclusion at all.

   6%
3. C

   Correct61% picked this

   A community cannot remain free without first having developed certain

   Why this is right

   As a conditional, this answer would look like this: you haven't community developed certain ? cannot remain political virtues free This pretty well matches the Evidence (on the left of the arrow) and the Conclusion (on the right of the arrow). The correct answer to Principle questions usually has this form. This didn't play off the "best chance" language I was suspecting, but it's just saying when an external force gives a community its freedom, the people don't go through the struggle to become free by their own efforts, and thus don't (have the best chance of) developing certain political values. The author goes from there to the conclusion that this community will almost surely fail to be truly free. There are a lot of tiny issues with this answer. "Fail to be free" vs. "cannot remain free" is not a great match. "didn't develop certain virtues" vs. "didn't have the best chance of certain virtues arising" is not a great match. But this is the best available answer for matching up language to the Evidence and to the Conclusion (i.e. our job on Principle questions).

   Skill tested: Principle-Conform · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

   61%
4. D

   Bad Premise Match15% picked this

   Political self-determination is required if a community is to remain

   This conditional would say don't have can't remain political self ? truly free determination Did the premise say "communities who are given their political self-determination by some intervening external force don't have political self-determination"? No, that's self-contradictory.

   15%
5. E

   Out of Scope: should17% picked this

   Real freedom should not be imposed on a community by

   Nothing in the argument contained any normative language like "should". We might come to this answer as a takeaway, based off the Conclusion. But this question stem isn't asking for something we might conclude from the Conclusion. It wants us to pick a principle that mimics the move from Evidence to Conclusion, so half the answer matches the Evidence and half matches the Conclusion. Nothing in the Evidence or the Conclusion matches "should".

   17%