Ethics Integrity and Aptitude Mixed Practice — MCQs with Answers (Set 9)

The correct answer is Jean-Paul Sartre. He declined the 1964 prize, just as he had declined other honours. Albert Camus is the trap: he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

The correct answer is The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). It argues that I cannot affirm my own freedom without affirming the freedom of others. The Second Sex is also Beauvoir’s, but it came in 1949. Being and Nothingness is Sartre’s (1943), and The Rebel is Camus’s.

Ubuntu offers a useful comparison with Western individualist ethics. Where Kant asks what duty an individual owes as a rational being, Ubuntu asks what a person owes as part of a community — the starting point is different, even when the two traditions reach similar conclusions.

Ubuntu is often compared to restorative justice — an approach that focuses on repairing harm and restoring relationships between the wrongdoer, the victim, and the community, rather than only on punishing the wrongdoer.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu is the person most responsible for making Ubuntu widely known outside Africa. He used it to explain the thinking behind South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which chose restoring community over pure punishment after apartheid ended.

The central idea of Ubuntu is that a person’s humanity is built through relationships with others, not something a person has alone from birth. Your character and worth are shaped by how you treat, and are treated by, your community.

Ubuntu is a philosophy from Southern Africa, most closely linked to Zulu and Xhosa culture. It is often summed up in the saying ‘I am because we are’ (Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu).

Confucius believed that good government works best through moral example, not just through strict laws and punishment. A ruler who is virtuous will naturally inspire virtuous conduct in the people.

Filial piety (respect and care for one’s parents and elders) is treated as the root of all other good conduct in Confucian ethics. The idea is that a person who cannot respect their own parents is unlikely to respect anyone else.

Li refers to proper conduct, ritual, and manners — the right way to behave in a given relationship or situation, such as how a child should treat a parent. Li gives Ren a practical, everyday shape.

Ren (often translated as ‘benevolence’ or ‘humaneness’) is Confucius’s central value. It means genuine care and goodwill toward other people, expressed through everyday conduct, not just as an abstract feeling.

Confucius (551-479 BCE) was a Chinese philosopher and teacher. His ideas were recorded by his students in a book called the Analects, which remains the main source for his teachings.

The correct answer is E. Sreedharan. He earned the name Metro Man while leading the Delhi Metro. Verghese Kurien is the milk revolution leader. APJ Abdul Kalam led the missile and space programmes. Sam Pitroda led the telecom mission. Memory hook: Sreedharan built the metro.

Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham anticipated the sentience-based argument centuries before Singer, famously writing of animals: ‘the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ — the historical origin point of the sentience criterion in Western moral philosophy.

A standard exam distinction is between an animal welfare position (animals may be used by humans, but suffering should be minimised) and an animal rights position (some uses of animals are impermissible regardless of how humanely they’re treated) — most existing legal frameworks, including India’s, are welfare-based.

India has a distinct constitutional basis for animal welfare — Article 51A(g) makes it a Fundamental Duty of every citizen to have compassion for living creatures, alongside the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960.

Singer termed unjustified discrimination based purely on species membership ‘speciesism’ — deliberately modelled on ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ as a parallel case of excluding a group from moral consideration based on an arbitrary trait.

Philosopher Peter Singer’s utilitarian argument, developed in his 1975 book Animal Liberation, holds that the capacity to suffer (sentience), not species membership, is what should determine an entity’s moral consideration.

Immanuel Kant is the German philosopher associated with duty-based ethics here.

Bentham and Mill are associated with utilitarian ethics.

Locke’s work on political authority does not make him the correct answer.

Kant’s account of duty differs from rajdharma’s focus on rulers.

Review Rajdharma: The Duty of the Ruler.

The IAT uses sorting speed across category pairings to estimate relative associations. Agreement totals belong to self-report scales. Essay length and income do not describe this task.

Review explicit and implicit measurement.

Social desirability bias concerns presenting oneself in an acceptable way. Technical faults and missing text create other problems. Seeking clarification does not itself show this bias.

Review response bias in surveys.

Validity concerns whether a measure captures its intended construct. Consistency concerns reliability. Attractive design, identical answers and length alone do not establish validity.

Review interpreting an attitude measure.

The answer is Ethos. It is the Greek word for character, from which the word ‘ethics’ comes through Late Latin and Greek ethical terms. Why the others fail: Logos means reason or study. Pathos means feeling. Nomos means law or custom, and it does not give us ‘ethics’. Memory hook: ethos gives ethics.

The answer is the Fairness or Justice approach. It asks that each person be given their due, often as fair or equal treatment. Why the others fail: The utilitarian approach counts the greatest good. The rights approach protects moral rights. The virtue approach asks what an ideal character would do. Memory hook: justice means fair shares.

The correct answer is law is enforced by the state with formal sanctions, while ethics is a broader standard. The PCA Act shows this. It punishes cruelty with fines, yet it still allows killing for food. Ethics can ask more than the law demands. Ethics is not always more lenient, and it applies to everyone, not just officials.