#19 - Any government practice that might facilitate the

[ataraxia10]

Thanks Eric!

[LearntheLSAT]

I was very torn between D and C. I diagrammed it out, and I was still perplexed. Can someone help me decipher where I went wrong?

xGAP (not gov abuse of power) -> CR (compelling reason) -> KS (keeping secrets)

Premise 2: KS -> xCR -> GAP

Is D now a mistaken negation? Please help!

[James Finch]

Hi Learn,

We really only have one conditional statement, the one given in the first sentence (the contrapositive of this is used as well). It diagrams out to:

May Facilitate Governmental Abuse of Power (MFGAP) Compelling Reason (CR)

Contrapositive:

CR MFGAP

The only other important bit of information here is that keeping secrets is a thing that falls under the rubric of MFGAP, everything else is too uncertain to conditionalize ("sometimes," "may") so we can infer:

MFGAPKS CRKS

CRKS MFGAPKS

And that's it. The rest is just fluff designed to confuse, especially the bit about keeping secrets about keeping secrets; in that case, both instances of keeping secrets, both the original secret and the knowledge that the government knows the original secret, must be justified by a compelling reason. So we looking for an answer choice that shows the secret is justified in being kept only with compelling reason, which is what (C) says.

Hope this clears things up!

[lathlee]

For the record, the first sentence of question stem is nested conditional, correct?

[Jeremy Press]

Hi lathlee,

Yes, it's certainly possible to read the first sentence as a nested conditional, though both Jonathan and James's explanation posts in this thread cut through that nested relationship in a way I find very helpful.

What you're seeing correctly is that there's a full conditional statement before the "except" in that first sentence, which is "Any government practice that might facilitate the abuse of power should not be undertaken," i.e.
Might Facilitate Abuse ~Undertake.

The "Unless" formula (which also applies to "except" statements) would require us to negate that entire conditional and make it the sufficient condition for the except portion of the statement.

~(Might Facilitate Abuse ~Undertake) Compelling Reason.

The sufficient condition resulting from that diagram is a bit of a beast to understand, but what it's essentially saying is "If it's not the sort of situation where the practice might facilitate abuse and you should not undertake it," in other words "If it's a situation where you SHOULD undertake the practice even though it might facilitate abuse."

So, the diagrams Jonathan and James arrive at in their explanations are the best (and simplest) understanding of that relationship, which in essence amounts to "If you undertake a government practice that might facilitate abuse of power, then you must have a compelling reason to do so."

I hope this helps!

Jeremy

[Adam354]

I got this right, but I think I may have gotten lucky and approached it the wrong way.

I made a conditional chain:

Concealing secret -> Facilitates Abuse of Power OK -> Compelling Reason

Answer C says if they conceal a secret, there must be a compelling reason. Easy peasy.

However, it seems like some may say the conditional chain was not true?

The contrapositive also matches the premise that insubstantial (non compelling) reasons enable abuse of power.

Not compelling reason -> Facilitating Abuse of Power Not Ok (would enable abuse of power) -> Concealing Secrets Not OK

[Adam Tyson]

A problem with your conditional chain, Adam, is that when you translate the first part back into English it reads as follows:

"If one conceals a secret, then facilitating the abuse of power is OK."

That's definitely not what the stimulus said!

It should be more like this:

"If it is OK for the gov't is going to conceal a secret that enables the abuse of power, then they must have a compelling reason for doing so."

Be careful not to put an absolute statement (one that has no if...then structure) into conditional terms! Here, there's a compound sufficient condition which you have translated into a sufficient and necessary condition.