Political philosopher: A just system of taxation would require each person's contribution to correspond directly to ...

shunhe on June 30, 2020

Hi @kbernard,

Thanks for the question! So let’s take a look at what the stimulus is telling us. We have a political philosopher telling us that a just system of taxation would have your contribution be based on how much society helped you. For taxation, wealth is the most objective way of doing this. So each person should be taxed solely in proportion to income.

So the general argument structure here is as following. The political philosopher found the best way to measure something, and then said that something similar (but not exactly the same) is the only measure that should be used. There are other ways that could be used as well (assets/property, or something like that), but the political philosopher concludes that the tax should be SOLELY on income (which isn’t even the same thing as wealth). So we want an argument that’s similar to this: that takes the best measure and concludes that it’s the only measure that should be used.

Now take a look at (A). We’re told that cars should be taxed in proportion to their danger. And the best way to measure danger is based on travel speed. So, the argument concludes, cars should be taxed only based on their ability to accelerate quickly. This has the same structure as the original stimulus. It finds the best way (travel speed) to measure something (danger), and concludes that something similar but not quite the same (ability to accelerate quickly) should be the only way to measure. So we see that (A) is parallel

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.