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PrepTest 73, Passage 4, Setup

Transcript

Passage four is the law passage on the test and it's also the comparative passage. So we actually have two passages, passage A and B. As we read them, we are gonna have to think about them in isolation and together, and most of the questions are going to involve comparative work in some way.

Questions will involve using both passages at the same time. There's also no italicized source inscription for this set, so any relationship between the two passages will have to get directly from the passages. So we dive in, passage A has 3 paragraphs. The first paragraph establishes that there are two principles to justice when you're talking about property.

Principle one is something called the principle of justice in acquisition. And principle two is the principle of justice in transfer. And that's about all the first paragraph has to say. The second paragraph concerns the ideal world, what would happen if the world were completely just? And they say, in the ideal world three things would be true.

They're listed out as a bulleted or numbered list. The first thing would be that the principle of acquisition that they mentioned in the first paragraph would hold true. The second thing is that the principle of transfer that they laid out in the last paragraph would be true. And the third thing is, there would be no exceptions to rule one and two.

All transfers of property, all property would meet the first two principles and that's in the ideal world. And then the third paragraph basically says that third principle doesn't hold in the real world. In the real world, there are exceptions to rules one and two, things like stealing or fraud.

People don't always follow the principles laid out in the first two paragraphs, so another principle is needed. This one is called the principle of rectification, and it's used to fix cases where the first two rules have been violated. Finally, this paragraph concludes by saying that this principle absolutely needs to be used.

It's not a hypothetical rule. If property is going to be just, it has to follow this rule two, but notice that passage A is pretty much completely theoretical. There aren't any concrete details there. No specific examples of real world cases, countries, people, it's all hypothetical.

And then passage B is a lot shorter, and it takes a moment before you can figure out, or it takes a little reading anyway before you can figure out what the relationship between the two passages is. And that relationship is basically that the second passage is an example of the principles from passage A in action. But the first paragraphs introduces the specific case, the INA, the Indian Non-Intercourse Act, which covers the transfer of property from Native Americans to other people and attempts to protect against fraud.

And both of those things should be familiar to you because both of those things were mentioned in passage A. So we're starting with the second principle from passage A, and one of the examples of a real world exception to that principle. And the second paragraph has one strange thing to note the very beginning, it starts with a qualification, a distancing sentence where the author says one natural one might almost say obvious way of reasoning.

Which is a really strange way of introducing something. It means that the author isn't taking ownership of the stuff that follows, the author's saying, well, here's one thing you could say. Though, the things that the author says are pretty definite and pretty moral. And it basically consists of using the third principle from passage A, the Principle of rectification, even though it doesn't use the name the principle of rectification.

It's describing cases where property was taken from the Native Americans and unjustly taken. So it needs to be given back. There's a need for something like rectification because of that specific case. And then at the final couple sentences, the author steps in and says, there is a caveat to all this, there is an exception or something we have to consider, which is that all the things that they just described, they're gonna have to be compromises to some of those things.

They're not going to be able to be completely abstract. But that caveat doesn't change the fundamental point. The land needs to be restored and Native Americans presumably using the INA or some other method. And that's basically our passages. The first one is theoretical, the second one is a practical application of the ideas, although it's not responding directly to passage A, it's just consistent with it.

And with that, we're going to go into questions.

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