Instructions [21 - 24 ]
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question. Imagine a world in which artificial intelligence is entrusted with the highest moral responsibilities: sentencing criminals, allocating medical resources, and even mediating conflicts between nations. This might seem like the pinnacle of human progress: an entity unburdened by emotion, prejudice or inconsistency, making ethical decisions with impeccable precision. . . . Yet beneath this vision of an idealised moral arbiter lies a fundamental question: can a machine understand morality as humans do, or is it confined to a simulacrum of ethical reasoning? AI might replicate human decisions without improving on them, carrying forward the same biases, blind spots and cultural distortions from human moral judgment. In trying to emulate us, it might only reproduce our limitations, not transcend them. But there is a deeper concern. Moral judgment draws on intuition, historical awareness and context - qualities that resist formalisation. Ethics may be so embedded in lived experience that any attempt to encode it into formal structures risks flattening its most essential features. If so, AI would not merely reflect human shortcomings; it would strip morality of the very depth that makes ethical reflection possible in the first place. Still, many have tried to formalise ethics, by treating certain moral claims not as conclusions, but as starting points. A classic example comes from utilitarianism, which often takes as a foundational axiom the principle that one should act to maximise overall wellbeing. From this, more specific principles can be derived, for example, that it is right to benefit the greatest number, or that actions should be judged by their consequences for total happiness. As computational resources increase, AI becomes increasingly well-suited to the task of starting from fixed ethical assumptions and reasoning through their implications in complex situations. But what, exactly, does it mean to formalise something like ethics? The question is easier to grasp by looking at fields in which formal systems have long played a central role. Physics, for instance, has relied on formalisation for centuries. There is no single physical theory that explains everything. Instead, we have many physical theories, each designed to describe specific aspects of the Universe: from the behaviour of quarks and electrons to the motion of galaxies. These theories often diverge. Aristotelian physics, for instance, explained falling objects in terms of natural motion toward Earth's centre; Newtonian mechanics replaced this with a universal force of gravity. These explanations are not just different; they are incompatible. Yet both share a common structure: they begin with basic postulates - assumptions about motion, force or mass - and derive increasingly complex consequences. . . . Ethical theories have a similar structure. Like physical theories, they attempt to describe a domain - in this case, the moral landscape. They aim to answer questions about which actions are right or wrong, and why. These theories also diverge and, even when they recommend similar actions, such as giving to charity, they justify them in different ways. Ethical theories also often begin with a small set of foundational principles or claims, from which they reason about more complex moral problems.
All of the following can reasonably be inferred from the passage EXCEPT:
Correct Answer :
with fixed moral starting points and expanding computational resources, the argument forecasts convergence on one ethical system and treats contextual judgement as unnecessary once formal reasoning scales across domains and cultures.
Solution :
The correct option is: "with fixed moral starting points and expanding computational resources, the argument forecasts convergence on one ethical system and treats contextual judgement as unnecessary once formal reasoning scales across domains and cultures."
To understand why this statement cannot be reasonably inferred from the passage, we must evaluate the author's arguments step-by-step.
First, let us look at how the passage views "contextual judgement." The statement claims that the passage treats contextual judgment as unnecessary. However, the second paragraph explicitly states that "Moral judgment draws on intuition, historical awareness and context - qualities that resist formalisation." The author expresses deep concern that removing this lived experience and context risks "flattening its most essential features" and stripping morality of its necessary depth. Therefore, the passage highly values contextual judgment and actively warns against dismissing it.
Second, let us examine the claim that the argument "forecasts convergence on one ethical system." In the fourth and fifth paragraphs, the author uses physics as an analogy to explain the formalization of ethics. The author notes that physics relies on multiple, often "incompatible" theories (such as Aristotelian physics versus Newtonian mechanics) rather than a single theory that explains everything. The author then directly states that ethical theories have a similar structure: "These theories also diverge and, even when they recommend similar actions, such as giving to charity, they justify them in different ways." This demonstrates that the passage expects ethical systems to remain divergent and structurally varied, not to converge into a single, universal system.
Because the given statement directly contradicts the passage's emphasis on the necessity of context and its explanation of divergent ethical theories, it cannot be reasonably inferred from the text. Thus, it is the correct answer to the question.
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