Exam (elaborations)
IB Philosophy IA: Democracy (Band 7)
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- IB philosophy internal assessment on democracy - Grade 7 essay
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Is democracy truly the best form ofgovernment?
, Stimulus:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new
nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal. […]
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not
hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have
consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note,
nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is
for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who
fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated
to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of
devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government
of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
(Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address)
Essay:
The stimulus is clear and passionate defence of democracy. Firstly, the
person who spoke those words was one of the few elected rulers in the world. It is
clear in his statement how he wishes for this experiment of democracy to succeed
and prove other positions wrong. Today, though, democracy is the dominant political
system in Western nations and has therefore not been truly scrutinized in many
years. Because Lincoln’s words remind us of this historical debate, they inevitably
encourage the critical response that we risk losing. Therefore, the choice to analyse
positions antagonistic to democracy is not born from hatred of said idea, but rather to
avoid that democracy becomes what Mill calls “dead dogma”: we must challenge our
ideas in order to remind ourselves of why we defend them and to motivate ourselves
to do so. Indeed, many such challenges have been offered in the past, two of which
will be analysed and evaluated in this essay. The final sentence of the stimulus is
probably the most important: is provides a definition of democracy as made up of
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