#11 - It is morally praiseworthy to be honest only if one is

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below!

[JocelynL]

Hello,
While I got this one right, I spent over 2 minutes on it and I want to obtain a better understanding on it so I can get faster.
Please let me know if my reasoning below is accurate:

Premise (first sentence)
Morally praiseworthy to be honest one is honest out of respect for morality

Conclusion:
NOT Praiseworthy
why? because he was concerned for own well-being , so we get concerned for own well being NOT praiseworthy


so by taking the contrapositive of the premise we get:
NOT honest out of respect for morality NOT praiseworthy

so we need to connect concerned for own well being and NOT honest out of respect of morality. Is answer choice C the contrapositive of this statement? This is where I get a little upside down sometimes with the ordering. How can I remember which one of the terms will be the sufficient and which one will be the necessary in the answer choice? This one was easy to identify because it was the only answer choice that had both terms present, but I know there are other questions where both terms appear in the answer choice and are just swapped.

Also, would E be the correct answer under a necessary assumption question stem?

Thanks!

[Jeremy Press]

Hi Jocelyn,

Your diagramming is great, and your reasoning is sound when it comes to looking for the concepts that need to be connected. Here's how to take that last step so that you can be certain about what you're looking for in the answer choice.

First, think about what you're given (in the premises). In this case, you correctly identified the relevant conditional that you were given in the premises as: NOT honest out of respect for morality NOT praiseworthy.

Second, think about what you're trying to prove (in the conclusion). You also correctly identified what you're trying to prove: concerned for own well being NOT praiseworthy.

What you need to find is an answer choice that you can "hook" to the premise you're given that, when hooked to the premise, will produce the conclusion you're trying to prove.

So let's look at answer choice C in that light. It diagrams as: performed out of respect for morality NOT concerned for own well being.

That can't be hooked up to the premise as it stands because the shared term (performed/honest out of respect for morality) is stated in the negative in the premise, and in the positive in the answer choice.

So check the contrapositive of answer choice C, which diagrams as: concerned for own well-being NOT performed out of respect for morality.

This CAN be hooked up to the premise, like so: concerned for own well-being NOT performed out of respect for morality NOT praiseworthy. Does that give us the pieces we need in the conclusion? Yes, because going from the first link to the third link of that chain is the proof of the conclusion.

How would we know that another answer (say, the Mistaken Reversal of answer choice C) would not work to prove the conclusion? We would diagram it (and its contrapositive) and we would see that there would be no way to hook it to the premise, either way we diagram it.

You can tell from this discussion that diagramming really is a savior when it comes to being certain on such questions. The better and more confident you continue to get with diagramming, the easier these questions become.

On your second question, answer choice E is a bit broad to be a necessary assumption here. The argument only concerns the narrow issue of what is morally praiseworthy for someone (in this case, Downing), so it doesn't need to make any sweeping assumptions about morality in general. If the answer were watered down a bit to say "Morality demands that one be honest in at least some cases where this could be detrimental to one’s own well-being," then I might consider that closer to a necessary assumption.

I hope this helps!

[arvinm123]

I selected answer choice C correct, but not by recognizing it as a conditional statement and then connecting to the conditional in the stimulus. It just seemed like the best answer choice using the Mechanistic Approach.

My question is: how can I recognize the conditional aspect of answer C? There were no indicators present and to me, it wasn't otherwise obvious that there was any conditionality here.

Thanks

[katehos]

Hi arvinm123!

In this scenario, "cannot" indicates necessity, so you can actually consider this to be an indicator present! If something "cannot" be the same as another, this tells us that it must be the case that these things are not the same (with all the negatives it can get a little confusing, I know, but try to think about how if a statement read: X cannot also be Y, this translates to "if X happens then Y must fail to happen").

This yields a diagram that looks like:

     Action performed out of respect for morality action motivated by concern for oneself

I hope this helps
Kate

[emilyjmyer]

Why is B wrong? Is it true, but just not enough to justify the conclusion?

[Adam Tyson]

Correct, Emily. The stimulus supports answer B, but answer B does not justify the conclusion. We need to prove that Downing's honesty in this case was not morally praiseworthy, and answer B doesn't accomplish that. "Some" answers are rarely strong enough to do the job in a Justify question.