#9 - Every action has consequences, and among the

[Blueballoon5%]

Hello! I have a question about answer choice B. When I negate this answer choice, I get, "We might not be able to know that past actions were good." Doesn't this attack the conclusion in the stimulus? If we cannot determine whether past actions are good or not, especially when we know about the consequences of these actions, how can the conclusion hold about our determination of the good/not in future actions?

Example: I do not know if my past volunteer work in the inner city was helpful to the people living there. I don't know whether this past action was good or not. Therefore, I may question my future actions. I may question whether my future decision to continuing volunteering will have good consequences.

[Emily Haney-Caron]

Hi Blueballoon,

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning here. The conclusion in the stimulus is, "good actions are impossible." Whether we can know that past actions were good or not is irrelevant to that conclusion, and if anything, that we can't even know that past actions were good seems to make it even more likely that good actions are impossible. Can you explain your thinking a little more?

[ronibass]

How would the negation technique work for answer choice E?

I got "For an action to be good we may not be able to know that it is good"

[Brook Miscoski]

Ronibass,

Your negation of (E) makes sense, but I would phrase it differently:

"An action can be good even if we do not know whether it is good."

OR

"Whether an action is good does not depend on whether we know it is good."

Why?

Answer (E) provides you with the following conditional relationship:

Action Good Know that Action Good

The Assumption Negation Technique should be applied using something like a logical opposite--you remove the stated relationship but nothing more--thus, since "Know that Action Good" is required, the negation simply becomes that it is not required. We don't go any further than that.

I believe that the correct negation is what you intended with your negation, which is why I agree your negation makes sense. I think that you can be a little more direct about the phrasing and that there may be times when better phrasing makes it easier for you to understand the effect of the negation.

[yusrak]

Hi powerscore,

I was able to understand the stimulus and break down the argument structure. I was even able to pre-phrase the assumption correctly, I outlined my reasoning below:
ARGUMENT STRUCTURE:
Premise 1: Action → consequences
Premise 2: Action good → consequences good
Premise 3: Future
Conclusion: Action good
Assumption: consequences good → actions good
The assumption is that, since consequences of an action occur in the future, and we cannot know the future, then we cannot know if an action is good until the consequences occur.

But after reading through this entire post I still don't understand why E is correct. Honestly, I don't get any of the answer choices. But in particular, I am really confused about answer choice E because it seems to be written as if it is circular reasoning: "action good --> action good." Also, I was expecting to see an answer that has an element of future tense. In my prephrased assumption, I linked consequences to the future since consequences happen in the future. None of the choices included a negated sufficient condition that insinuates a future consequence.

I also don't understand how the assumption negation technique would work. The prephrased assumption is the contrapositive (which is the negated and reversed elements of the conditional statement made in premise 2). But answer choice E is written in positive terms so it seems to me like this choice already applied the assumption negation technique before I applied it. Does that make sense?

I am so confused about what any of the answers even mean, especially E. Please help!
Yusra Khafagi

[Adam Tyson]

You've done a lot of work here with the conditional relationships, Yusra! The problem is that your conditionals are all missing a key element, and that is "knowing". The second one is not "if an action is good, then its consequences are good." Instead, it's "if we know that an action is good then we have to know that its consequences are good." KNOWING is the key difference between the premises and the conclusion. Let me illustrate:

Knowing that I will get accepted by Harvard Law School requires knowing that I got a great LSAT score. But I have no internet connection, the phones are down, and no mail is being delivered, so I cannot know whether I got a great LSAT score. Therefore, it is impossible for me to get accepted by Harvard.

I must be assuming that getting into Harvard requires KNOWING that I will get into Harvard, that it cannot happen without my knowledge. But couldn't I be accepted and just not know it? That's the problem in the argument - I made a (bad) assumption that for a thing to occur, I have to KNOW that it occurred. That is what answer E is saying. It's not circular - it's connecting the knowledge to the actual occurrence of the thing. The negation is saying "something could be good even if you don't know it's good," which is like saying "you could get accepted by Harvard and just not know it."

Try that one again and see if it makes more sense once you include that element of knowledge, and see if the gap between the premises and the conclusion becomes more clear.

[unfairbear]

The problem is an assumption questions that starts off like, "Every action has consequences, and among the consequences of any action are other actions"

This is how I diagrammed out the problem to eventually compare it to the answer choices:
to know whether an is action good--> we need to know whether the consequences are good
But we cannot know the future, which leads to this contrapoitive:
So we cannot know whether the consequences are good-->and so we cannot know whether the action is good
conclusion:Good actions are impossible.

So We are trying to connect : We cannot know whether an action is good-->good actions are impossible

And E basically gives the contrapositive by saying: for an action to be good we must be able to know that it is good.

Would anybody be so kind as to check my reasoning here? And with these kinds of direct prephrases in hand would it be even worth spending time on other answers?

(Also, the negation technique was nto really helpful for me here which is why I wanted to know if my way was correct)

[unfairbear]

1 - actions have consequences. in other words: actions --> consequence
2 - consequences of any action ---> other actions
3 - knowledge of good actions ---> knowledge of good consequences.
4 - we can never know the future.
conclusion: good actions are impossible to perform.

first sentence is purely descriptive and defines actions and consequences. second sentence introduces a new element---KNOWLEDGE of those descriptive objects. the conclusion however, makes a descriptive statement which refers to the first sentence, "good actions are impossible" and that conclusion is based on the second part of the sentence, "because we can't know the future"
it is implied in the reasoning that knowledge of good consequences ---> knowledge of the future.
so the contrapositive of the chained condition gives us: it is impossible to have knowledge of good actions.

so basically the conclusion is saying, good actions are impossible because knowledge of good actions are impossible.
the gap here is the action itself and knowledge of the action.

conclusion:
if knowledge of good actions are impossible then good actions are impossible to perform.
not knowledge of good action --> not possible to perform good actions.
taking the contrapositive of that:
good actions --> knowledge of good actions
therefore the necessary assumption is that good actions require KNOWLEDGE of good actions.

in a real test setting you will likely not have the luxury of deeply analzying an argument so one method is to identify the conceptual gap: the conclusion makes a statement about first sentence (actions/consequence) but its justification is given by the second sentence where it introduces a new concept: knowledge. so the correct answer choice will mention both action and knowledge of action to link the gap and the only answer choice that mentions both is E.

[Adam Tyson]

Thanks for the helpful reply, unfairbear! But one thing I would caution against is the use of arrows to denote relationships that are not conditional. This could cause some confusion. For example, where you wrote:

consequences of any action ---> other actions

That would, in our methodology, be interpreted as "if there are consequences of any action, then there must be other actions." But that's not what the stimulus is saying, because there is no "if" about the consequences. Actions have consequences, and those consequences include other actions.

We prefer to reserve arrows for conditional statements, and sometimes for formal logic (where we modify the arrows with notations about either "some" or "most"). Just wanted to be sure that someone else reading this explanation wouldn't be taken down a confusing path!

Other than that, nicely done! I couldn't agree more with this:

so basically the conclusion is saying, good actions are impossible because knowledge of good actions are impossible. the gap here is the action itself and knowledge of the action.

That's the crux of the whole thing!