#13 - Editorial: In rejecting the plan proposed by

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Flaw in the Reasoning. The correct answer choice is (B)

This argument is flawed because it exhibits a General Lack of Relevant Evidence for the Conclusion.

The argument asserts that the president's decision was courageous, and uses that evidence to conclude that "the president clearly acted in the best interests of the nation." Note the use of the word "clearly." As in the real world, a conclusion on the LSAT described as "clear" hardly ever is. Here, evidence that the president acted courageously does not provide support for why that act was in the "best interests of the nation." What is best for the nation? What was the plan proposed by the parliament, and how did that plan relate to the "best interests of the nation?" The answers to these questions are necessary to determine whether the conclusion follows logically from the premises. The president's courage may or may not be relevant to the "best interests of the nation," and it is flawed reasoning to infer this conclusion from such insufficient and potentially irrelevant evidence.

Armed with our prephrase, that the argument exhibits a General Lack of Relevant Evidence for the Conclusion, we can head to the answer choices. Skimming through the answer choices, we are looking for language pertaining to the use of evidence. Answer choice (B) describes this reasoning flaw. The stimulus equates without justification evidence that the president acted courageously with evidence that the decision was in the best interests of the nation. Answer choice (B) is correct.

consider why the remaining answer choices are incorrect. Recall that an incorrect answer choice to a Flaw in the Reasoning question will either fail the Fact Test, because the stated error did not occur in the stimulus, or it will describe something that appeared in the stimulus but did not constitute a reasoning error.

Answer choice (A) This answer fails the Fact Test. While the argument describes the president as courageous, a quality we may assume is desirable in a political leader, it does not describe a second quality. Since the argument describes only one quality, it cannot confuse two qualities.

Answer choice (B): This is the correct answer choice. See discussion above.

Answer choice (C) It is irrelevant whether many, or any, citizens have a narrow partisan interest in the election reform plan. Because it is not a reasoning error to ignore irrelevant information, this answer choice is incorrect.

Answer choice (D) This answer choice fails the Fact Test. The argument asserts that the president knew this decision would be met with "fierce opposition" at home. This premise inherently contains the possibility of strong opposition to the plan within the president's own party. Do not be misled by the reference to "narrow partisan interests" in the last sentence. The assertion that "all citizens who place the nation's well-being of above narrow partisan interests will applaud this courageous action" does not require that the only domestic opposition to the plan comes from a separate political party.

Answer choice (E) This answer choice also fails the Fact Test. Just as in answer choice (D), the final sentence of the stimulus does not require that "any plan proposed by a parliament will necessarily serve only narrow partisan interests." Note that the highly restrictive, absolute language of this answer choice, used to describe an alleged assumption made by the argument, makes it highly vulnerable to being excluded by application of the Fact Test.

[jrc3813]

Is D wrong because even if there was a strong opposition to the plan among the president's party it doesn't effect the argument? The answer choice is trying to trick you into thinking that the president was concerned about narrow partisan interests instead of the well being of the whole nation. But in reality an entire party could be united against something for non-partisan reasons. It's therefore not an assumption the argument depends on and therefore fails the fact test. Is that the right way to look at it?

[Francis O'Rourke]

Hi JRC,

I'd agree with you that the existence of strong opposition within the president's own party would not effect the argument one way or another. The editorial still misses the point that we never established that the plan was in anyone's best interest.

As the administrator noted, we already know that the president knew about the guaranteed 'fierce opposition,' and we do not need to assume that this opposition came only from the other parties. Learning that there was some segment of the president's own part that was strongly opposed would not affect the argument. It sounds like you understood this part of the argument very well!

[Coleman]

I stroke out the answer choice B right off the bat because it contains a new/ambiguous word that wasn't mentioned in the passage at all and seemed pretty irrelevant.
B states "It fails to distinguish between evidence concerning the courage required to make a certain decision and evidence concerning the WISDOM of making that decision."
I really don't understand the wisdom part. How come it could be related to the given passage? Does this wisdom possibly imply the choice that serves the best interest of the nation?

Thanks in advance!

[Paul Marsh]

Hey Coleman! You said:

I struck out the answer choice B right off the bat because it contains a new/ambiguous word that wasn't mentioned in the passage at all

I would strongly caution against doing this for Flaw questions. Good Flaw answer choices are abstract (at times even wishy-washy) descriptions of what the reasoning gap is in our stimulus's argument. They can often contain language that a) does not appear directly in our stimulus and that b) is somewhat ambiguous. All we're looking for in an answer is whether it actually describes the error in reasoning that occurred.

As with any Flaw question, we want to focus on what about the conclusion doesn't follow logically from the premises. Here, the conclusion states that the president clearly acted in the best interest of the nation. But all of the premises solely discuss the courageousness and unpopularity of the action. So the conclusion doesn't really follow from the premises. The argument mistakenly assumes that what is courageous/unpopular must necessarily also be right. That's the Flaw.

(B) is the only answer choice that really gets at that Flaw. You are correct that "wisdom" is referring to "best interest of the nation". I agree with you that that's not a perfect match, but again, Flaw questions rarely precisely match the language of our stimulus. Even with that disconnect, it's the only choice that gets at the actual Flaw we Pre-Phrased.

Hope that helps!

[flowskiferda]

I still don't quite see why A is wrong. As you point out, the argument is flawed because it assumes that acting courageously is the same as acting in the best interests of the nation. In other words, the argument confuses the quality of courage with a quality that yields effective results (ie acting in the best interest of the nation), which is answer choice A. I felt that "effective decision making" is a much closer match to acting "in the best interests..." than "wisdom" given in choice B, a very broad and vague category.

[Jeremy Press]

Hi flow,

So, I like your close reading, but I still have a couple problems with answer choice A. First, it's problematic to call "acting in the nation's best interests" a "quality," as opposed to simply an "action." Let's say a President takes the action of signing a bill cutting taxes. That's something the President did (an action). And maybe it's an action that is in the nation's best interests. Maybe it's not. But the action itself (signing the bill) doesn't tell me anything about the President's personal qualities: courage, empathy, intelligence, resolve, etc.

Even reading the stimulus the way you have, you run into another problem with answer choice A: how, from the stimulus (which is all we have to rely on), can we tell whether the quality of courage is "merely desirable?" Where's the evidence that it is merely desirable, as opposed to, say, extremely important or even crucial? How can we tell from the stimulus that the "quality" (I don't like calling it that, but let's assume we can) of "acting in the nation's best interest" is essential to effective political decision making? In other words, how can I tell from the stimulus that you couldn't make at least some effective decisions (in certain circumstances) without acting in the nation's best interests? I can't. Nothing tells me what's essential versus what's merely desirable. A flaw answer won't leave you in that limbo, to assume whatever you want to assume about what is desirable or what is essential. We would need some language telling us that the qualities under discussion were, in fact, just desirable, or essential, before we could pick an answer like A.

I hope this helps!

[lsatstudying11]

Hello!

I have a question about the conclusion of this argument. While doing the question, I was unsure whether the conclusion was that 'the president acted in the best interest' or 'citizens who care about the well-being of the nation will applaud the president's decision.' I thought that it was the latter, because, as evidence for that, we can point to the claim that the president did in fact act in the best interest. In turn, this claim could be (faultily) supported by the courage the president displayed. Is that a totally off way of interpreting this argument? What should tip me off that the conclusion is not the last line but the part about the president acting in the best interest of the nation? Thank you for your help!!

[KelseyWoods]

Hi lsatstudying11!

It's always good to carefully analyze the relationships between the different parts of your argument to determine which part is the main conclusion!

I would agree that the last sentence as the main conclusion of the argument. But the first sentence is still definitely A conclusion--the second sentence is offered as support for it and "clearly" is usually a conclusion indicator term. So the first sentence is then an intermediate conclusion--it has some support for it, and it in turn is used to support the main conclusion. When you have an argument that has an intermediate conclusion, the flaw could come at any of the steps: it could be between the premises and the intermediate conclusion or it could be between the intermediate conclusion and the main conclusion. In this case, the main flaw comes between the premise and the intermediate conclusion. That last sentence is really just kind of summing up everything. That's why we focus on the conclusion in the first sentence when identifying this flaw.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Kelsey