It is often said that people should be rewarded for doing a given job in proportion to the effort it costs them to do it. However, a little reflection will show that this is, in fact, a very bad idea, since it would mean that those people with the least skill or natural aptitude for a particular task would be the ones given the most incentive to do it. Which one of the following argumentative strategies is used above?
(A) stating a general principle and then presenting reasons in favor of adopting it
(B) providing evidence that where the principle under discussion has been adopted, the results usually have been undesirable
(C) demonstrating that a consequence that had been assumed to follow from the principle under consideration need not follow from it
(D) attempting to undermine a general principle by arguing that undesirable consequences would follow from it
(E) showing that, in practice, the principle under consideration could not be uniformly applied