According to the fourth paragraph of the passage, what specifically does Bentham characterize as preference of ignora...

Emil-Kunkin on January 31, 2022

Hi Jing Jing, this is a tough question stem. We are being asked what specifically Bentham would consider to be preference of ignorance to knowledge. We are also told that this is in the fourth paragraph.

If we look in paragraph 4, we do see the relevant lines around line 39, although I would probably at least skim the context before trying to understand the line in question. The author tells us that Bentham believed "the character of evidence should be weighed by the jury, the alternative was to prefer ignorance to knowledge." Explicitly, we are told that Bentham considered "the alternative" to be what we are looking for, however, our answer choice is not going to be in the form of "the alternative."

We could possibly rephrase the first half of this to mean that Bentham thought that Juries should be allowed to determine the merit or credibility of evidence. Therefore we can conclude that not allowing them to do so would be to prefer ignorance to knowledge. Thus, we are looking for an example of what Bentham would have considered to be a case where juries are prevented from considering evidence and weighing it on its merits.

This matches D quite closely, and D is indeed correct.

jingjingxiao11111@gmail.com on February 11, 2022

Thank you!