Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Test - 35

Directions : The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

This week's release of the Improving Outcomes for All report should have been a watershed moment for the future of Australian schooling. The report is the culmination of an extensive process of national consultations, school visits and research led by an esteemed expert panel to inform the next national school reform agreement in 2025. In the shadow of two decades of declining results and worsening inequalities, expectations were high for a blueprint to reimagine our schools to ensure all young Australians have a better and fairer education. Unfortunately, the report falls short - especially when it comes to addressing inequalities in student outcomes. Rather than a bold vision for educational transformation, it treads the well-worn path of the status quo, offering few tangible targets to address the structural inequalities that are baked into our system.

As the report notes, Australian schools have some of the highest levels of concentrated socioeconomic advantage and disadvantage across OECD nations and this trend is worsening. These trends map on to our schooling sectors, with concentrated advantage in private schools and concentrated disadvantage in public schools. Australia also has shocking learning gaps in literacy and numeracy between young people from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds. By the time students reach year 3, the achievement gap between young people from high and low socioeconomic backgrounds is already equivalent to 2.3 years of learning in reading and this balloons to a staggering 5.1 years of learning by year 9. These inequalities are mirrored in last week's release of the programme for international student assessment results, showing alarming achievement gaps between Australian students from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in reading, science, and maths.

Far from being the great equaliser, these trends show our education systems exacerbate inequalities - an embarrassing state of affairs for a country that prides itself on the "fair go". While the report consistently outlines equity challenges and rightly argues all schools need to be fully funded in line with the Gonski funding model, there is not a single target specifically designed to close widening achievement gaps. The closest we get is to tackling achievement gaps are weaker targets to increase the proportion of students in "priority equity cohorts" who meet proficiency standards for reading and numeracy in Naplan. In practice, these targets aspire to little more than getting more kids achieving minimum benchmarks in standardised tests. Such targets are likely to have unintended consequences. Schools will be compelled to triage students to get them over the line and Naplan will be even more "high stakes" than it already is.

It beggars belief that a report that frames the achievement gap as a primary indicator of educational segregation and clear predictor of post-school outcomes provides nothing of substance to close the gap. One shining light is a call for governments to increase socioeconomic diversity in schools, including a recommendation to incentivise high-calibre teachers to work in low-socioeconomic area schools. The problem is this vision entirely ignores the broader structural inequalities in Australian education that produce advantage and disadvantage in the first place. There are a few recommendations that could tackle the deeper issues, but these don't flow through to specific targets. One is for governments to implement "full-service school models" to connect better with health, family, and disability services. Another is to develop policies led by First Nations people to make schools more culturally aware and responsive.

Directions : The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

This week's release of the Improving Outcomes for All report should have been a watershed moment for the future of Australian schooling. The report is the culmination of an extensive process of national consultations, school visits and research led by an esteemed expert panel to inform the next national school reform agreement in 2025. In the shadow of two decades of declining results and worsening inequalities, expectations were high for a blueprint to reimagine our schools to ensure all young Australians have a better and fairer education. Unfortunately, the report falls short - especially when it comes to addressing inequalities in student outcomes. Rather than a bold vision for educational transformation, it treads the well-worn path of the status quo, offering few tangible targets to address the structural inequalities that are baked into our system.

As the report notes, Australian schools have some of the highest levels of concentrated socioeconomic advantage and disadvantage across OECD nations and this trend is worsening. These trends map on to our schooling sectors, with concentrated advantage in private schools and concentrated disadvantage in public schools. Australia also has shocking learning gaps in literacy and numeracy between young people from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds. By the time students reach year 3, the achievement gap between young people from high and low socioeconomic backgrounds is already equivalent to 2.3 years of learning in reading and this balloons to a staggering 5.1 years of learning by year 9. These inequalities are mirrored in last week's release of the programme for international student assessment results, showing alarming achievement gaps between Australian students from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in reading, science, and maths.

Far from being the great equaliser, these trends show our education systems exacerbate inequalities - an embarrassing state of affairs for a country that prides itself on the "fair go". While the report consistently outlines equity challenges and rightly argues all schools need to be fully funded in line with the Gonski funding model, there is not a single target specifically designed to close widening achievement gaps. The closest we get is to tackling achievement gaps are weaker targets to increase the proportion of students in "priority equity cohorts" who meet proficiency standards for reading and numeracy in Naplan. In practice, these targets aspire to little more than getting more kids achieving minimum benchmarks in standardised tests. Such targets are likely to have unintended consequences. Schools will be compelled to triage students to get them over the line and Naplan will be even more "high stakes" than it already is.

It beggars belief that a report that frames the achievement gap as a primary indicator of educational segregation and clear predictor of post-school outcomes provides nothing of substance to close the gap. One shining light is a call for governments to increase socioeconomic diversity in schools, including a recommendation to incentivise high-calibre teachers to work in low-socioeconomic area schools. The problem is this vision entirely ignores the broader structural inequalities in Australian education that produce advantage and disadvantage in the first place. There are a few recommendations that could tackle the deeper issues, but these don't flow through to specific targets. One is for governments to implement "full-service school models" to connect better with health, family, and disability services. Another is to develop policies led by First Nations people to make schools more culturally aware and responsive.

Directions : The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

This week's release of the Improving Outcomes for All report should have been a watershed moment for the future of Australian schooling. The report is the culmination of an extensive process of national consultations, school visits and research led by an esteemed expert panel to inform the next national school reform agreement in 2025. In the shadow of two decades of declining results and worsening inequalities, expectations were high for a blueprint to reimagine our schools to ensure all young Australians have a better and fairer education. Unfortunately, the report falls short - especially when it comes to addressing inequalities in student outcomes. Rather than a bold vision for educational transformation, it treads the well-worn path of the status quo, offering few tangible targets to address the structural inequalities that are baked into our system.

As the report notes, Australian schools have some of the highest levels of concentrated socioeconomic advantage and disadvantage across OECD nations and this trend is worsening. These trends map on to our schooling sectors, with concentrated advantage in private schools and concentrated disadvantage in public schools. Australia also has shocking learning gaps in literacy and numeracy between young people from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds. By the time students reach year 3, the achievement gap between young people from high and low socioeconomic backgrounds is already equivalent to 2.3 years of learning in reading and this balloons to a staggering 5.1 years of learning by year 9. These inequalities are mirrored in last week's release of the programme for international student assessment results, showing alarming achievement gaps between Australian students from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in reading, science, and maths.

Far from being the great equaliser, these trends show our education systems exacerbate inequalities - an embarrassing state of affairs for a country that prides itself on the "fair go". While the report consistently outlines equity challenges and rightly argues all schools need to be fully funded in line with the Gonski funding model, there is not a single target specifically designed to close widening achievement gaps. The closest we get is to tackling achievement gaps are weaker targets to increase the proportion of students in "priority equity cohorts" who meet proficiency standards for reading and numeracy in Naplan. In practice, these targets aspire to little more than getting more kids achieving minimum benchmarks in standardised tests. Such targets are likely to have unintended consequences. Schools will be compelled to triage students to get them over the line and Naplan will be even more "high stakes" than it already is.

It beggars belief that a report that frames the achievement gap as a primary indicator of educational segregation and clear predictor of post-school outcomes provides nothing of substance to close the gap. One shining light is a call for governments to increase socioeconomic diversity in schools, including a recommendation to incentivise high-calibre teachers to work in low-socioeconomic area schools. The problem is this vision entirely ignores the broader structural inequalities in Australian education that produce advantage and disadvantage in the first place. There are a few recommendations that could tackle the deeper issues, but these don't flow through to specific targets. One is for governments to implement "full-service school models" to connect better with health, family, and disability services. Another is to develop policies led by First Nations people to make schools more culturally aware and responsive.

Directions : The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

This week's release of the Improving Outcomes for All report should have been a watershed moment for the future of Australian schooling. The report is the culmination of an extensive process of national consultations, school visits and research led by an esteemed expert panel to inform the next national school reform agreement in 2025. In the shadow of two decades of declining results and worsening inequalities, expectations were high for a blueprint to reimagine our schools to ensure all young Australians have a better and fairer education. Unfortunately, the report falls short - especially when it comes to addressing inequalities in student outcomes. Rather than a bold vision for educational transformation, it treads the well-worn path of the status quo, offering few tangible targets to address the structural inequalities that are baked into our system.

As the report notes, Australian schools have some of the highest levels of concentrated socioeconomic advantage and disadvantage across OECD nations and this trend is worsening. These trends map on to our schooling sectors, with concentrated advantage in private schools and concentrated disadvantage in public schools. Australia also has shocking learning gaps in literacy and numeracy between young people from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds. By the time students reach year 3, the achievement gap between young people from high and low socioeconomic backgrounds is already equivalent to 2.3 years of learning in reading and this balloons to a staggering 5.1 years of learning by year 9. These inequalities are mirrored in last week's release of the programme for international student assessment results, showing alarming achievement gaps between Australian students from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in reading, science, and maths.

Far from being the great equaliser, these trends show our education systems exacerbate inequalities - an embarrassing state of affairs for a country that prides itself on the "fair go". While the report consistently outlines equity challenges and rightly argues all schools need to be fully funded in line with the Gonski funding model, there is not a single target specifically designed to close widening achievement gaps. The closest we get is to tackling achievement gaps are weaker targets to increase the proportion of students in "priority equity cohorts" who meet proficiency standards for reading and numeracy in Naplan. In practice, these targets aspire to little more than getting more kids achieving minimum benchmarks in standardised tests. Such targets are likely to have unintended consequences. Schools will be compelled to triage students to get them over the line and Naplan will be even more "high stakes" than it already is.

It beggars belief that a report that frames the achievement gap as a primary indicator of educational segregation and clear predictor of post-school outcomes provides nothing of substance to close the gap. One shining light is a call for governments to increase socioeconomic diversity in schools, including a recommendation to incentivise high-calibre teachers to work in low-socioeconomic area schools. The problem is this vision entirely ignores the broader structural inequalities in Australian education that produce advantage and disadvantage in the first place. There are a few recommendations that could tackle the deeper issues, but these don't flow through to specific targets. One is for governments to implement "full-service school models" to connect better with health, family, and disability services. Another is to develop policies led by First Nations people to make schools more culturally aware and responsive.

Directions : The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

In this final proposition of his Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein prohibits the impossible. But why should one prohibit something that is already in itself impossible? The answer is relatively easy: if we ignore this prohibition, we produce statements which are for Wittgenstein meaningless, just as speculations about the noumenal domain are in Immanuel Kant's philosophy. (The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan qualified the prohibition of incest in a similar way, claiming that its result is to render the impossible possible: if incest has to be prohibited, it means that it is possible to violate the prohibition.) There is, however, an ambiguity in Wittgenstein's proposition, which resides in the double meaning of the German nicht .. kann. It can mean either simple literal impossibility, or a deontic (moral) prohibition: 'You cannot talk/behave like that!' The proposition can thus be read in the radical ontological sense intended by Wittgenstein himself - that there are things impossible to talk about, such as metaphysical speculations - or else in a conformist moral sense: 'Shut up about things you are not allowed to talk about!'

But the ethical imperative is the very opposite of this conformist 'wisdom'. Horrors like the Holocaust or the Communist purges or colonial disasters cannot be passed over in silence (as happens in today's China). We have to bring them out. The tautological cynical wisdom, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' is the opposite of this ethical injunction, since, on the ethical reading it means: Even if you know you cannot keep quiet about it, do not talk about it, since talking about it would pose too much of a threat to you. What, then, about the literal tautology? 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' defines poetry: poetry is an attempt to put in words what cannot be said - to evoke it - and this holds precisely for traumatic events like the Holocaust. Any prosaic description of the horrors of the Holocaust fails to render its trauma. This is why Adorno was wrong with his famous claim that after Auschwitz poetry is no longer possible: it is prose which is no longer possible, since only poetry can do the job. Poetry is the inscription of impossibility into a language: when we cannot say something directly yet we nonetheless insist in speaking, we unavoidably get caught in repetitions, postponements, indirectness, surprising cuts, etc. We should always bear in mind that the 'beauty' of classic poetry (symmetric rhymes etc.) comes second; that primarily, poetry is a way to compensate for the basic failure or impossibility of communication.

But this is not Wittgenstein's last word on communication. Already in the Tractatus he introduces another term which works as the opposite of 'saying' (Sprechen), namely 'showing' or 'displaying' (Zeigen). So we can also say: Whereof one cannot speak, that shows itself. Wittgenstein's 'showing' has nothing to do with 'appearing' as opposed to what's hidden. Rather, his 'showing' is the form of appearance that is ignored when we focus on what appears. Wittgenstein follows here Marx and Freud, who both claim that the true secret is not Beyond what appears, but the form of appearing itself: the commodity form, or the form of dreams, in Marx and Freud respectively. The difference between zeigen (showing) and schweigen (keeping silent) is that while schweigen is an act (I decide not to speak, which implies that I am already within the domain of speech - a stone does not 'keep silent'), zeigen happens involuntarily: it is a by-product of what I am doing when I speak.

Directions : The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

In this final proposition of his Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein prohibits the impossible. But why should one prohibit something that is already in itself impossible? The answer is relatively easy: if we ignore this prohibition, we produce statements which are for Wittgenstein meaningless, just as speculations about the noumenal domain are in Immanuel Kant's philosophy. (The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan qualified the prohibition of incest in a similar way, claiming that its result is to render the impossible possible: if incest has to be prohibited, it means that it is possible to violate the prohibition.) There is, however, an ambiguity in Wittgenstein's proposition, which resides in the double meaning of the German nicht .. kann. It can mean either simple literal impossibility, or a deontic (moral) prohibition: 'You cannot talk/behave like that!' The proposition can thus be read in the radical ontological sense intended by Wittgenstein himself - that there are things impossible to talk about, such as metaphysical speculations - or else in a conformist moral sense: 'Shut up about things you are not allowed to talk about!'

But the ethical imperative is the very opposite of this conformist 'wisdom'. Horrors like the Holocaust or the Communist purges or colonial disasters cannot be passed over in silence (as happens in today's China). We have to bring them out. The tautological cynical wisdom, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' is the opposite of this ethical injunction, since, on the ethical reading it means: Even if you know you cannot keep quiet about it, do not talk about it, since talking about it would pose too much of a threat to you. What, then, about the literal tautology? 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' defines poetry: poetry is an attempt to put in words what cannot be said - to evoke it - and this holds precisely for traumatic events like the Holocaust. Any prosaic description of the horrors of the Holocaust fails to render its trauma. This is why Adorno was wrong with his famous claim that after Auschwitz poetry is no longer possible: it is prose which is no longer possible, since only poetry can do the job. Poetry is the inscription of impossibility into a language: when we cannot say something directly yet we nonetheless insist in speaking, we unavoidably get caught in repetitions, postponements, indirectness, surprising cuts, etc. We should always bear in mind that the 'beauty' of classic poetry (symmetric rhymes etc.) comes second; that primarily, poetry is a way to compensate for the basic failure or impossibility of communication.

But this is not Wittgenstein's last word on communication. Already in the Tractatus he introduces another term which works as the opposite of 'saying' (Sprechen), namely 'showing' or 'displaying' (Zeigen). So we can also say: Whereof one cannot speak, that shows itself. Wittgenstein's 'showing' has nothing to do with 'appearing' as opposed to what's hidden. Rather, his 'showing' is the form of appearance that is ignored when we focus on what appears. Wittgenstein follows here Marx and Freud, who both claim that the true secret is not Beyond what appears, but the form of appearing itself: the commodity form, or the form of dreams, in Marx and Freud respectively. The difference between zeigen (showing) and schweigen (keeping silent) is that while schweigen is an act (I decide not to speak, which implies that I am already within the domain of speech - a stone does not 'keep silent'), zeigen happens involuntarily: it is a by-product of what I am doing when I speak.

Directions : The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

In this final proposition of his Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein prohibits the impossible. But why should one prohibit something that is already in itself impossible? The answer is relatively easy: if we ignore this prohibition, we produce statements which are for Wittgenstein meaningless, just as speculations about the noumenal domain are in Immanuel Kant's philosophy. (The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan qualified the prohibition of incest in a similar way, claiming that its result is to render the impossible possible: if incest has to be prohibited, it means that it is possible to violate the prohibition.) There is, however, an ambiguity in Wittgenstein's proposition, which resides in the double meaning of the German nicht .. kann. It can mean either simple literal impossibility, or a deontic (moral) prohibition: 'You cannot talk/behave like that!' The proposition can thus be read in the radical ontological sense intended by Wittgenstein himself - that there are things impossible to talk about, such as metaphysical speculations - or else in a conformist moral sense: 'Shut up about things you are not allowed to talk about!'

But the ethical imperative is the very opposite of this conformist 'wisdom'. Horrors like the Holocaust or the Communist purges or colonial disasters cannot be passed over in silence (as happens in today's China). We have to bring them out. The tautological cynical wisdom, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' is the opposite of this ethical injunction, since, on the ethical reading it means: Even if you know you cannot keep quiet about it, do not talk about it, since talking about it would pose too much of a threat to you. What, then, about the literal tautology? 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' defines poetry: poetry is an attempt to put in words what cannot be said - to evoke it - and this holds precisely for traumatic events like the Holocaust. Any prosaic description of the horrors of the Holocaust fails to render its trauma. This is why Adorno was wrong with his famous claim that after Auschwitz poetry is no longer possible: it is prose which is no longer possible, since only poetry can do the job. Poetry is the inscription of impossibility into a language: when we cannot say something directly yet we nonetheless insist in speaking, we unavoidably get caught in repetitions, postponements, indirectness, surprising cuts, etc. We should always bear in mind that the 'beauty' of classic poetry (symmetric rhymes etc.) comes second; that primarily, poetry is a way to compensate for the basic failure or impossibility of communication.

But this is not Wittgenstein's last word on communication. Already in the Tractatus he introduces another term which works as the opposite of 'saying' (Sprechen), namely 'showing' or 'displaying' (Zeigen). So we can also say: Whereof one cannot speak, that shows itself. Wittgenstein's 'showing' has nothing to do with 'appearing' as opposed to what's hidden. Rather, his 'showing' is the form of appearance that is ignored when we focus on what appears. Wittgenstein follows here Marx and Freud, who both claim that the true secret is not Beyond what appears, but the form of appearing itself: the commodity form, or the form of dreams, in Marx and Freud respectively. The difference between zeigen (showing) and schweigen (keeping silent) is that while schweigen is an act (I decide not to speak, which implies that I am already within the domain of speech - a stone does not 'keep silent'), zeigen happens involuntarily: it is a by-product of what I am doing when I speak.

Directions : The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

In this final proposition of his Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein prohibits the impossible. But why should one prohibit something that is already in itself impossible? The answer is relatively easy: if we ignore this prohibition, we produce statements which are for Wittgenstein meaningless, just as speculations about the noumenal domain are in Immanuel Kant's philosophy. (The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan qualified the prohibition of incest in a similar way, claiming that its result is to render the impossible possible: if incest has to be prohibited, it means that it is possible to violate the prohibition.) There is, however, an ambiguity in Wittgenstein's proposition, which resides in the double meaning of the German nicht .. kann. It can mean either simple literal impossibility, or a deontic (moral) prohibition: 'You cannot talk/behave like that!' The proposition can thus be read in the radical ontological sense intended by Wittgenstein himself - that there are things impossible to talk about, such as metaphysical speculations - or else in a conformist moral sense: 'Shut up about things you are not allowed to talk about!'

But the ethical imperative is the very opposite of this conformist 'wisdom'. Horrors like the Holocaust or the Communist purges or colonial disasters cannot be passed over in silence (as happens in today's China). We have to bring them out. The tautological cynical wisdom, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' is the opposite of this ethical injunction, since, on the ethical reading it means: Even if you know you cannot keep quiet about it, do not talk about it, since talking about it would pose too much of a threat to you. What, then, about the literal tautology? 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' defines poetry: poetry is an attempt to put in words what cannot be said - to evoke it - and this holds precisely for traumatic events like the Holocaust. Any prosaic description of the horrors of the Holocaust fails to render its trauma. This is why Adorno was wrong with his famous claim that after Auschwitz poetry is no longer possible: it is prose which is no longer possible, since only poetry can do the job. Poetry is the inscription of impossibility into a language: when we cannot say something directly yet we nonetheless insist in speaking, we unavoidably get caught in repetitions, postponements, indirectness, surprising cuts, etc. We should always bear in mind that the 'beauty' of classic poetry (symmetric rhymes etc.) comes second; that primarily, poetry is a way to compensate for the basic failure or impossibility of communication.

But this is not Wittgenstein's last word on communication. Already in the Tractatus he introduces another term which works as the opposite of 'saying' (Sprechen), namely 'showing' or 'displaying' (Zeigen). So we can also say: Whereof one cannot speak, that shows itself. Wittgenstein's 'showing' has nothing to do with 'appearing' as opposed to what's hidden. Rather, his 'showing' is the form of appearance that is ignored when we focus on what appears. Wittgenstein follows here Marx and Freud, who both claim that the true secret is not Beyond what appears, but the form of appearing itself: the commodity form, or the form of dreams, in Marx and Freud respectively. The difference between zeigen (showing) and schweigen (keeping silent) is that while schweigen is an act (I decide not to speak, which implies that I am already within the domain of speech - a stone does not 'keep silent'), zeigen happens involuntarily: it is a by-product of what I am doing when I speak.

Directions : The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

We are dual-faceted creatures. On the one hand, each of us has the power of individual agency: we experience our choices as up to us, to do with as we will. On the other hand, we confront a world that prevents us from doing as we would choose: we are finite beings subject to limitations of time, space, and energy, and we are inexorably caught up in wider socio-historical processes. This double nature has implications for our interpersonal practices of moral criticism, that is, our evaluative responses to other agents' actions and attitudes. While extant theorizing is dominated by a focus on reactive attitudes like blame and resentment, many have noted that these alone seem inadequate to the task of responding fully to the variety and complexity of problems we encounter in moral life.

One of these is the problem of living ethically in a highly unjust world. It has become impossible to ignore the moral implications of everyday actions that contribute to globalized systems of exploitation and oppression: eating foods whose production contributes to the devastation of the planet or wearing clothing stitched by maltreated workers. I will refer to such forms of quotidian participation in injustice as 'structural wrongs'. Structural wrongs raise challenges for moral theory. When the world's most pressing moral problems result from complex forces wholly outside individual control, blaming people for structural wrongs can seem injudicious. And yet, moral critique feels absolutely necessary.

We should distinguish between what I call summative and formative moral criticisms, in order to respond properly to two distinct modes of morality: the imperatival and the aspirational. While summative critical responses like blame are justified when exercises of agency violate clear moral standards, the justification for formative responses - whose purpose is to improve rather than assess agency - lies in the fact that we all deserve feedback whenever our limited, imperfect, and structurally constrained agency falls short of moral ideals. I contend that philosophers should be much more attuned to practices of formative moral criticism because these may be warranted (or efficacious) in cases where summative criticism is not.

Here are two essential truths about our moral agency: The first is that, qua agents, we have the power to choose some actions over others, that is, to exercise our agency as we will. Against this background of agentic freedom, we experience morality as a delimitation to our choices - it is in this vein that we speak of the 'demands' or 'dictates' of morality. We simply ought not to consider certain acts to be live options, however tempting. By setting standards that serve as hard constraints on moral behaviour, morality commands us to make certain choices, and it is in our hands whether we heed them or not. This is morality in the imperatival mode.

The other truth, however, is that our agency is inherently very limited. We are finite creatures who survive in time and space, are dependent on material and social support, and lack many kinds of information, resources, and abilities that would enable us to act better morally. In a world where individuals' allotments of happiness vary (sometimes greatly) and their moral value is (sometimes flagrantly) disregarded, we sometimes perceive the pull of morality in a different way. Here, we do not experience things as fully up to us, but we feel called upon to do something. We recognise that even though it is not specifically our job to alleviate others' homelessness or hunger, we cannot simply mind our own business without further thought. So, although morality (according to all but the most stringent views) permits us sometimes to walk away from others in need, it retains a normative grip on us, such that if we walk away, we know we are still morally bound to work in other ways towards ameliorating their plight. This is morality in the aspirational mode.

Directions : The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

We are dual-faceted creatures. On the one hand, each of us has the power of individual agency: we experience our choices as up to us, to do with as we will. On the other hand, we confront a world that prevents us from doing as we would choose: we are finite beings subject to limitations of time, space, and energy, and we are inexorably caught up in wider socio-historical processes. This double nature has implications for our interpersonal practices of moral criticism, that is, our evaluative responses to other agents' actions and attitudes. While extant theorizing is dominated by a focus on reactive attitudes like blame and resentment, many have noted that these alone seem inadequate to the task of responding fully to the variety and complexity of problems we encounter in moral life.

One of these is the problem of living ethically in a highly unjust world. It has become impossible to ignore the moral implications of everyday actions that contribute to globalized systems of exploitation and oppression: eating foods whose production contributes to the devastation of the planet or wearing clothing stitched by maltreated workers. I will refer to such forms of quotidian participation in injustice as 'structural wrongs'. Structural wrongs raise challenges for moral theory. When the world's most pressing moral problems result from complex forces wholly outside individual control, blaming people for structural wrongs can seem injudicious. And yet, moral critique feels absolutely necessary.

We should distinguish between what I call summative and formative moral criticisms, in order to respond properly to two distinct modes of morality: the imperatival and the aspirational. While summative critical responses like blame are justified when exercises of agency violate clear moral standards, the justification for formative responses - whose purpose is to improve rather than assess agency - lies in the fact that we all deserve feedback whenever our limited, imperfect, and structurally constrained agency falls short of moral ideals. I contend that philosophers should be much more attuned to practices of formative moral criticism because these may be warranted (or efficacious) in cases where summative criticism is not.

Here are two essential truths about our moral agency: The first is that, qua agents, we have the power to choose some actions over others, that is, to exercise our agency as we will. Against this background of agentic freedom, we experience morality as a delimitation to our choices - it is in this vein that we speak of the 'demands' or 'dictates' of morality. We simply ought not to consider certain acts to be live options, however tempting. By setting standards that serve as hard constraints on moral behaviour, morality commands us to make certain choices, and it is in our hands whether we heed them or not. This is morality in the imperatival mode.

The other truth, however, is that our agency is inherently very limited. We are finite creatures who survive in time and space, are dependent on material and social support, and lack many kinds of information, resources, and abilities that would enable us to act better morally. In a world where individuals' allotments of happiness vary (sometimes greatly) and their moral value is (sometimes flagrantly) disregarded, we sometimes perceive the pull of morality in a different way. Here, we do not experience things as fully up to us, but we feel called upon to do something. We recognise that even though it is not specifically our job to alleviate others' homelessness or hunger, we cannot simply mind our own business without further thought. So, although morality (according to all but the most stringent views) permits us sometimes to walk away from others in need, it retains a normative grip on us, such that if we walk away, we know we are still morally bound to work in other ways towards ameliorating their plight. This is morality in the aspirational mode.