The position that punishment should be proportional to how serious the offense is but that repeat offenders should receive harsher punishments than first-time offenders is unsustainable. It implies that considerations as remote as what an offender did years ago are relevant to the seriousness of an offense. If such remote considerations were relevant, almost every other consideration would be too. But this would make determining the seriousness of an offense so difficult that it would be impossible to apply the proportionality principle. The statement that considerations as remote as what an offender did years ago are relevant to the seriousness of an offense plays which one of the following roles in the argument? ["It is an allegedly untenable consequence of a view rejected in the argument's overall conclusion.", 'It is a statement the argument provides grounds to accept and from which the overall conclusion is inferred.', 'It is the overall conclusion in favor of which the argument offers evidence.', 'It is a premise offered in support of an intermediate conclusion of the argument.']