Q11

[Thotslayer69]

Perhaps I was reading too fast, and picked D.

It seems that a community's moral judgment is irrelevant to assessing the penalties, not the morality. Thanks for your help

[BenjaminE417]

I had the choices down to D and E. I ultimately went with E because paragraph 2 says "economists hold that the fact that a community may find some crimes more abhorrent than others or wish to send a message about the importance of some values - such as, say, not endangering citizens' health by selling tainted food - should not be a factor in determining penalties.

I took that as fitting the word "inappropriate" more than "irrelevant"

Any additional clarification would be appreciated. Some of these questions took me a little longer to get the right answer which hurt me with time for passage 4...

[Thotslayer69]

ohthatpatrick, could you grace us with your veritable insight? Much obliged old sport!

[AmyH231]

So I also got it down to D and E, and finally down to E. This is because D is a half-right half wrong answer. Would the economists agree with the statement that a community's moral judgement of crimes is irrelevant? Absolutely. See lines 18-19. However, the second half of the choice is where it all goes wrong. This passage is about the severity of financial punishment for corporations. It does not deal with the morality of those corporations. For all intents and purposes, we only see morality mentioned in regards to the severity of a punishment, not how the corporations are perceived. An article that addressed a corporation's perceived morality would go into branding, press, PR, etc. This passage does not address that.

E is right even though some of the language is tricky. For example, "of certain corporate crimes" might trip someone up who views lines 18-19 as all encompassing. But an answer that is right for a whole group is still correct for a smaller subset of said group.