#24 - Editorialist: Landis, one of this cityʼs top elected

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below!

[cascott15]

Hello,

I'm just curious if anyone can confirm why D is the right answer. What I took away from the stim is:
Conclusion: Landis is guilty of violating his official duties.
Why? Spending $10,000 frivolously is immoral when so many people live in poverty.

I chose answer C because in order from him to be guilty, he would've had to do it... right? The stim even says "Spending" $10,000 is the immoral part. So if he didn't spend it, how can he be guilty of spending?

But reflecting on the answer, it looks like it's trying to fill the gap between being accused of violating official duties and doing something immoral (in this case, spending money). Answer D supplies the information that immoral violating public duties, then yeah, I guess Landis would be guilty.


Thanks for any feedback.

[Zach Foreman]

This is a very, tricky, tricky one!
The main trap is to define precisely what the conclusion is. The conclusion is, in fact, "But Landis is guilty of such violation regardless of the money's source", which is to say "Landis is guilty of violating his official duties." That is a tall order to prove, which is what a justify must do. So we have to tie Landis closely with violating official duties. C might be necessary, but it is not sufficient to prove the conclusion. Yes, he must knowingly act but that is no proof that he violated official duties. We need more.
If D is true, and we know that he did something immoral, then we know that he must have violated his official duties, either by misusing public funds or by immorally spending his own money. Now we have tied Landis directly to violating his official duties.

[tfab]

So for this question I properly identified the conclusion when the editorialist states, "But Landis is guilty of such violation regardless of the money's source." I was thrown off by the following sentence when he/she says,"...is clearly immoral when so many people in our city live in poverty." This led me to choosing Answer (B). I wasn't a big fan of this answer and I was between (B) and (D), unfortunately I chose the wrong one. If I could get some clarification on why (D) is correct that would be great. I know (B) is weak but I'm failing to understand why (D) is the correct answer, thanks!

[Paul Marsh]

Hi tfab! Let's walk through this Justify problem.

The general steps to attacking any Justify question are 1) identify the conclusion, 2) identify the premises, 3) find the gap in how the conclusion is drawn from the premises, 4) Pre-Phrase an answer that is sufficient to close the gap, and 5) find the answer that does what we want our Pre-Phrase to do.

Step 1. You've correctly identified the conclusion nicely. Step 2. The sentence in this stimulus that follows the conclusion ("Spending $10,000 so frivolously...") is a premise for that conclusion. (Answer Choice (B) is essentially just a re-statement of that premise, and so does nothing at all to close any gaps in the argument. Therefore it can't be the correct answer.) The other premise is the first sentence of the stimulus. The second sentence is kind of a distraction and contains no information that the conclusion uses. It's not a premise. So our premises and conclusion look like this:

Premise 1: City official Landis spent $10,000 to redecorate his office.
Premise 2: Spending $10,000 so frivolously is clearly immoral when so many people in our city live in poverty.
Conclusion: Landis violated his official duties.

Step 3. Now we want to look for a "gap" between the conclusion and the premises. In other words, do the premises logically lead us completely to the conclusion? Or do they not quite get us there? There are many types of "gaps" in Justify (or Assumption, Strengthen, and Weaken) questions, but one of the most common is the presence in the conclusion of a word, concept, or idea that was not accounted for in our premises. Here, our conclusion discusses official duties, but our 2 premises don't mention them. So the "gap" here is that the argument concludes something about official duties, but the premises don't. That aspect of the conclusion is unsupported by the premises.

Step 4. We want a Pre-Phrase sufficient to close the gap, so that the premises plus our answer will lead us completely to the conclusion. It will tie together the premises and the unexplained portion of our conclusion. So an ideal Pre-Phrase here would be something like, "Any immoral act by a city official is a violation of official duties".

Step 5. Answer Choice (D) accomplishes what we want our Pre-Phrase to do - it ties together the premises and the previously unexplained portion of our conclusion about official duties.

Formulaically breaking down Justify questions like this might seem a little tedious, but it's incredibly helpful for improving your ability to identify the gap in an argument and Pre-Phrase a response to that gap. Hope that helps!

[j199393]

Hi! Would the assumption negation technique work for narrowing the answer choices down to D? I wasn't sure how to negate this one:

D - Every public official has an official duty never to perform immoral actions.

Would it be: Every public official DOES NOT HAVE an official duty never to perform immoral actions
OR
Every public official has an official duty to perform immoral actions (got rid of the "never")

Thanks!

[momgoingbacktoschool]

Hi! Would the assumption negation technique work for narrowing the answer choices down to D? I wasn't sure how to negate this one:

D - Every public official has an official duty never to perform immoral actions.

Would it be: Every public official DOES NOT HAVE an official duty never to perform immoral actions
OR
Every public official has an official duty to perform immoral actions (got rid of the "never")

Thanks!

The word "if" in the question stem indicates that this is a justify the conclusion question (sufficient assumption) rather than an assumption question (necessary assumption). The assumption negation technique should only be used for necessary assumption question types.

[Jeremy Press]

Hi! Would the assumption negation technique work for narrowing the answer choices down to D? I wasn't sure how to negate this one:

D - Every public official has an official duty never to perform immoral actions.

Would it be: Every public official DOES NOT HAVE an official duty never to perform immoral actions
OR
Every public official has an official duty to perform immoral actions (got rid of the "never")

Thanks!

Hi j1993,

As mentioned by the previous poster, you should not use the Assumption Negation Technique to eliminate answers on a Justify question. The reason answer choice D is correct is that (as discussed in Paul's excellent response earlier in the thread) it closes the logical gap that we find when we compare the premises to the conclusion. And, when we add answer choice D to the stated premises in the stimulus (per the Justify Formula), the answer fully validates the conclusion. No other answer closes the gap between premises and conclusion, nor do any of the other answers here fully validate the conclusion.

I hope this helps!