2023 RI KI Y6 T3 CT P2

This document consists of 4 printed pages. RAFFLES INSTITUTION 2023 Year 6 Term 3 Common Test Higher 2 Knowledge and Inquiry 9759/02 17 May 2023 2 hours Additional Materials: Answer Paper READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST Do not turn this sheet over until you are told to do so. Write your name and CT group on all the work you hand in. Write in dark blue or black ink. Do not use staples, paper clips, highlighters, glue or correction fluid/tape. Section A Answer Question 1. Section B Answer any two questions. At the end of the examination, fasten your answers to each section separately. You will be asked to submit your answer to each section separately. The number of marks is given in brackets [ ] at the end of each question or part question.

2 2023 RI KI YEAR 6 TERM 3 CT Section A You must answer question one. 1. Morals are not objective. What you think is right may not line up with what someone else thinks is right. But morals do not appear to be subjective either – we clearly generally agree that it is wrong for me to burn down your house, kill your loved ones, and give you a horrible disease, for no reason. Understanding these two positions is key: we treat “don’t burn houses down” as more or less an objective moral principle, even while many of us actively claim not to have objective moral principles. And this is the great tension of the 21 st Century: we don’t want to give our morals any sort of objective nature for fear of ethnocentrism, but we can’t help noticing that there might just be something objective about them. There are three main ways of thinking about whether moral knowledge is subjective or objective. Examining the consequences of both positions is one way. If an immoral act is happening, and we do not speak up because we are afraid of being ethnocentric (in other words, we fear that we incorrectly evaluate other cultures based on our own values and beliefs), then we have no interpersonal morals at all and we fall into mere subjectivism. But if we do not speak about morality, then this element of morality ceases to exist in the practical world, and morals disconnected from a practical world do no good at all. If the consequentialist argument cannot give us an answer to whether moral knowledge is subjective or objective, then we should perhaps appeal to scientific authority. Some philosophers argue that moral facts are analogous to scientific facts and can be discovered through empirical investigation. For example, they may point to evolutionary psychology as evidence that certain moral beliefs are universal and grounded in human nature. However, this argument is fallacious because it assumes that science has a monopoly on truth and that scientists are impartial observers of the world. In reality, scientific research is influenced by social and political factors, and scientific consensus can change over time as new evidence emerge