Q4 - Food company engineer: I stand by my decision

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Principle-Conform (the Necessary Assumption of Principle tasks)

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: I'm at peace with my decision to dump small amounts of chemicals into the river, even though this might cause health issues.
Evidence: I fish in that river; I'll continue to. And, I have no problem if other food companies do what we did.

Answer Anticipation:
We are still looking for "If Premise, then Conclusion" bridge wording, but it doesn't need to be a conditional and shouldn't go overboard. Maybe something like "If you aren't deterred by the harmful effects you may have caused (or similar effects others might cause), then you can stand by your decision to have possibly caused harmful effects."

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Almost. "If others are planning to do X, then one is justified in doing X". We don't KNOW that others are planning to do X. The author was just saying that hypothetically. So I would assume there's a better answer that's a tighter fit.

(B) This probably goes AGAINST the idea of dumping chemicals into the river, but more importantly, there is no language in the argument that matches up with "benefit the greatest number of people".

(C) YES. "If you're willing to face the consequences of your action or others' performing the same action, you're justified in doing the action". The author shows us she's willing to face the consequences of her action by saying she will continue to fish in the river. And she indicates in the last sentence that she's willing to face others' doing the same action.

(D) This principle helps us to conclude that someone SHOULD NEVER perform an act. The argument we're matching with concludes that someone WAS FINE in performing an act. We don’t need to keep reading past that first part.

(E) This says "If an action doesn't harm anyone else, it's okay to do it". The second half matches our conclusion, but the first half doesn't match our premise. We never said "dumping chemicals in the river will not harm anyone else". There's even some evidence to the contrary.

Takeaway/Pattern: This was fairly straightforward. When we are picking which principle would conform to or justify an argument, our biggest shortcut is quickly eliminating answers that aren't even addressing the idea in the conclusion. In this case, only D was a quick elimination, since it was about "NO, don't do an action", whereas the other for were correctly rules about "YES, do the action". To distinguish among the other four, we're just asking ourselves "which of those four rules has a trigger that we can clearly match up with the evidence?"

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