#3 - A just government never restricts the right of its

[lenihil]

Dear PowerScore,

Could you please clarify how to diagram the stimulus:

A just government never restricts the right of its citizens to act upon their desires except when their acting upon their desires is a direct threat to the health or property of other of its citizens.

I would diagram it like this:

Just Government -> (Restrict -> Direct Threat)
that is:
JG -> (R -> DT)
which is the same as:
JG + R -> DT

My questions:
1. How to diagram "except when"? Is it the same as diagraming "except"? Does "except when" indicate a double-arrow relationship?
2. If my diagram is correct, is the following statement correct? "An unjust government would restrict writing fictions."
(I think this statement is correct. Because JG + R -> DT, and writing fictions is a member of group -DT, then from -DT -> -JG or -R we can conclude Writing Fitctions -> -JG or -R. But we know the government restricts it, which fails -R. Then the -JG must be true, that is, the Government is unjust.)

Thanks in advance for your help. Sorry for the trouble.

[Luke Haqq]

Hi lenihil!

Happy to address your questions. First, you ask about how to diagram this stimulus. You write,

JG -> (R -> DT)
which is the same as:
JG + R -> DT

The second of these diagrams is how I would have diagrammed this one. It's also worth noting that these two diagrams don't mean the same thing. The top one is saying that if there is a just government, then we know that it restricts rights--which is not something that we know from the stimulus. Rather, the second of your diagrams correctly portrays the given conditional reasoning--that is, if there is a just government and it is also restricting rights, then this means there must be a direct threat. The contrapositive of this diagram would be:

DT JG or R

In other words, if there is no direct threat, then either it is not a just government or it is not restricting rights.

To your second question, yes, you can diagram "except when" the same as you would the word "except," and similar words like "unless" or "without."

Lastly, you write,

If my diagram is correct, is the following statement correct? "An unjust government would restrict writing fictions."

We wouldn't know this statement to be true based on the stimulus (it wouldn't be a parallel example of an application of the principle in the stimulus). The stimulus only tells us information about what a just government would not do, while the above statement is a conclusion about what an unjust government would do. There are certain things that we know would disqualify a government from being a just one (i.e., restricting rights when there is no direct threat), but not necessarily what things make one an unjust government. It's also not necessarily the case that failing to be a just government renders a government instead to be unjust (much like the absence of virtue doesn't necessarily imply vice)--we would need more information from the stimulus to know one way or the other on this.

[lenihil]

Dear Luke,

Thank you so much for clarifying things up!! Now I get it. Thank you for your time and patience!

[stacykim621]

Hi,

So, after reading the stimulus and trying multiple times, I finally got the right diagram. But my problem now is that I actually don't understand what the diagram means in real sense.

The diagram I don't seem to understand is -DT -> -Just or -Restrict. So if I translate this diagram into a sentence, it should be, "If it is not a direct threat, it is unjust government or does not restrict the rights of the citizens."

What does this sentence mean? I feel sort of weird asking this but I've been pondering for a while to decipher the meaning of this sentence. The part I don't get is the unjust government part. Not a direct threat to the health/property of the the citizens and unjust government. What is the relationship between these two?

Thank you in advance for your help!!!

[Luke Haqq]

Hi stacykim621!

To rephrase the somewhat confusedly worded sentence in the stimulus, we're given a general rule: just governments don't restrict the rights of people to act on their desires. While that's the general rule, we're told that there's an exception to it--namely, they do restrict this type of rights when people acting on their desires would harm the health or property of others.

So suppose we have a just government that is restricting these rights:

JG & RR

If this is true, what do we know must be the case? We can infer that this is to prevent harm to health or property:

JG & RR PH

The contrapositive of this is:

PH JG or RR

That is, if a government's act was not done to prevent harm, then it either is not a just government or the act did not restrict rights. This seems to be saying the same thing as what you have diagrammed as "-DT -> -Just or -Restrict" (if it's response is not to a direct threat, then we know either the government is not just or the response is not a restriction of rights).