Q16 - Some people take their moral

[jimmy902o]

Hello, I am having difficulty trying to figure out how to answer this question. Originally I chose "A" and am not sure why its wrong. I also tried diagraming but am still confused, please help!

[timmydoeslsat]

The answer is A!

I would not diagram this stimulus.

I would internalize to say:

Some people take moral cues from govt.

+

For those people, they cannot comprehend a situation where something could be legal yet also be immoral.


We want to find an answer choice that would make those views inconsistent with an answer choice if they also were to believe the answer choice as well.

A) Law doesn't cover all circumstance in which one person morally wrongs another.

So this is saying that the law basically does not cover every single situation in which a person morally wrongs another, which we can say is immoral.

I think of this answer choice as a hypothetical like this:

Sometimes the law has to catch up to events that society wants punishment for. Think of many new laws that have come about after tragedies. At the time, the act was not illegal, but people could definitely perceive it as immoral.

I may be ruining my reputation but I remember a lifetime movie I watched once.

It was about how a guy installed a video surveillance camera in a couples bedroom. He had the feed of the video going to his house. At that time, when the couple found the camera and called the police, the police told them that a crime had not been committed. There was nothing illegal about what he did.

Obviously, laws have now changed.

Did I really just go from an LSAT question to a lifetime movie?

[ymcho2013]

Could you explain why answer choice B is wrong?

[ohthatpatrick]

This is an interesting question, especially due to the weird question stem.

Essentially, it is an Inference - Must Be False type question.

They are saying, if the stimulus is true (or in this case, believed by someone), which of these answer choices contradicts it (would be an inconsistent belief)?

Most Must Be False questions give you some sort of conditional rule and then break it in the correct answer choice.

Here, we are given the absolute-type idea that "it's inconceivable that something that's legally permissible could be immoral".

If we try to paraphrase that into friendlier form:
"Nothing legally permissible is immoral"

When we convert that "No A are B" into conditional logic, it is the same as saying "All A are ~B".

Legally permiss. --> ~immoral

Since NOT-immoral is a double-negative, let's write that even friendlier:

Legally permiss --> moral

And of course, we always consider the contrapositive:

Immoral --> Legally impermissible

Normally on this test, if they provide you with a conditional statement, the correct answer hinges on your understanding of the contrapositive.

Let's look at the answers, knowing we need something that would contradict:
Legally permiss --> moral
Immoral --> Legally impermiss

(A) seems to be our answer. Our contrapositive "Immoral --> Legally impermiss" could be read as "ALL immoral things are legally impermissible". (A) contradicts this statement, by saying "Some immoral things are not covered by law".

(B) is a conditional that says
"Legally impermiss --> Immoral".
We could rephrase this as
"All legally impermissible things are immoral".
This does not contradict our original belief that
"All legally permissible things are moral."

The tricky part about (B) is that it describes a FLAWED inference. (B) is the same as reading our original conditional backwards. (The technical name for this is Necessary/Sufficient Conflation). However, a FLAWED inference is not the same as MUST BE FALSE.

If I say:
All NFL players are male.
Tim is a male.
Thus, Tim is an NFL player.

My conclusion is no doubt a flawed inference; however, that doesn't mean it MUST be false. It still could be true.

People often confuse the two on MUST BE FALSE questions, because most of our time on the LSAT we're trying to find the flawed reasoning. But that's different from finding a contradictory statement.

To contradict a conditional claim, you need to provide the sufficient condition but deny the necessary condition.

So if I want to contradict
NFL --> male
then I need to say something like
"Some NFL players are female"

If I say "All males are NFL players" or "everyone who isn't an NFL player is female", I am not contradicting (only using bad reasoning).

back to the remaining answers:
(C) is out of scope because the behavior of people is totally distinct from the morality of laws.

(D) would match this person's thinking, if anything, since he tends to believe that legality and morality go hand in hand.

(E) is WAY out of scope since we never discussed regulations/economy, and therefore there's no way (E) could be contradicting what was said in the stimulus.

Hope this helps. Let me know if it elicits further questions.

[economienda]

The stimulus presents a biconditional:

government codes of law <--> moral cues

[donghai819]

Hi Patrick,

I understood what you wrote, and I just have a more specific question regarding to answer choice A.

As you wrote, what stimulus says is: permissible --> moral.
What A means is immoral --some--> permissible, which provides an counterexample towards the original argument.

My question is about the negation, or the contradiction of a conditional statement.

My understanding is here:
original statement: permissible --> moral,
its negation would be: permissible --> ~moral
~permissible --> ~moral is not the negation of the original.
Is ~permissible --> moral the negation of the permissible --> moral?
I guess not, but:
contrapositive of "~permissible --> moral" is "~moral --> permissible", which IS a legit negation form of the contrapositive of the original statement "~moral--> ~permissible"

I don't know if this makes sense, so in short, "Is ~A --> B a negation form of A --> B? If it is not, why the contrapositive forms of these two, ' ~B --> A, ~B --> ~A' seem are correct negation form of each other. ."

[donghai819]

People who are also wondering about my last post can refer the question:https://www.manhattanprep.com/lsat/forums/q11-people-who-browse-the-web-t5272.html, where Patrick already provided 3 thorough explanations.

[ohthatpatrick]

I think we need to clarify whether you're talking about "negation" in the sense of ILLEGAL MOVE or whether you're talking about "negation" in the sense of contradiction / the negation test.

We're NOT (I think) talking about illegal negations such as this:
If you're in LA, then you're in California. Bob is not in LA. Thus Bob is not in California.

LA -> CA
~LA -> ~CA

Instead, you're asking "how would I correctly negate a conditional? how do you contradict a conditional?"

Put simply, you contradict a conditional with ONE counterexample, something that triggers the SUFF but doesn't satisfy the NEC.

So if we have "permissible --> moral" we could rephrase that as "ALL permissible things are moral things".

The negation of that idea is "NOT ALL permissible things are moral things".
i.e. SOME permissible things are NOT moral

Let's say we had a conditional that said "Only penguins can survive at the south pole."

Survive @ SP --> penguin

The negation is "it's NOT ONLY penguins who can survive at the south pole"
i.e. There is at least one thing that can survive at the south pole that is NOT a penguin

It's important that you realize that when you contradict a conditional you're not making a NEW conditional. You're just looking for a SOME statement that triggers the SUFF but doesn't satisfy the NEC.

[HarshS283]

This is an interesting question, especially due to the weird question stem.

They are saying, if the stimulus is true (or in this case, believed by someone), which of these answer choices contradicts it (would be an inconsistent belief)?
.

HI,

I am having a hard time to discern the question stem. Can you please help me.

"Those whose view is described above hold inconsistent beliefs if they also believe that"

This is how I am dissecting it

"Those whose view is described above" -> talking about "Some people"

I rephrased the question something like this "Some people who take a moral cue from the governmental code of laws hold inconsistent beliefs....". I couldn't understand anything by doing so, therefore I just skipped this question.