Read the following passage carefully before you choose your answers. (The following is excerpted from a recent nonfiction book.)

Pragmatism is an account of the way people think—the way they come up with ideas, form beliefs, and reach decisions. What makes us decide to do one thing when we might do another thing instead? The question seems unanswerable, since life presents us with many types of choices, and no single explanation can be expected to cover every case. Deciding whether to order the lobster or the steak is not the same sort of thing as deciding whether the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In the first case (assuming price is not an object) we consult our taste; in the second we consult our judgment, and try to keep our taste out of it. But knowing more or less what category a particular decision belongs to— knowing whether it is a matter of personal preference or a matter of impersonal judgment—doesn’t make that decision any easier to make. “Order what you feel like eating,” says your impatient dinner companion. But the problem is that you don’t know what you feel like eating. What you feel like eating is precisely what you are trying to figure out.

“Order what you feel like eating” is just a piece of advice about the criteria you should be using to guide your deliberations. It is not a solution to your menu problem—just as “Do the right thing” and “Tell the truth” are only suggestions about criteria, not answers to actual dilemmas. The actual dilemma is what, in the particular case staring you in the face, the right thing to do or the honest thing to say really is. And making those kinds of decisions—about what is right or what is truthful—is like deciding what to order in a restaurant, in the sense that getting a handle on tastiness is no harder or easier (even though it is generally less important) than getting a handle on justice or truth.

People reach decisions, most of the time, by thinking. This is a pretty banal statement, but the process it names is inscrutable. An acquaintance gives you a piece of information in strict confidence; later on, a close friend, lacking that information, is about to make a bad mistake. Do you betray the confidence? “Do the right thing”—but what is the right thing? Keeping your word, or helping someone you care about avoid injury or embarrassment? Even in this two-sentence hypothetical case, the choice between principles is complicated—as it always is in life—by circumstances. If it had been the close friend who gave you the information and the acquaintance who was about to make the mistake, you would almost certainly think about your choice differently—as you would if you thought that the acquaintance was a nasty person, or that the friend was a lucky person, or that the statute of limitations on the secret had probably run out, or that you had acquired a terrible habit of betraying confidences and really ought to break it. In the end, you will do what you believe is “right,” but “rightness” will be, in effect, the compliment you give to the outcome of your deliberations. Though it is always in view while you are thinking, “what is right” is something that appears in its complete form at the end, not the beginning, of your deliberation.

*William James (1842–1910), American philosopher and psychologist, was a leader of the philosophical movement of Pragmatism.

In the third paragraph, the author emphasizes which of the following aspects of thinking?

A)Its amorality
B)Its opaqueness
C)Its complexity
D)Its irrationality
E)Its consistency