#18 - Editorial: In order to encourage personal

[lsatretaker]

Argh. It's so frustrating because I was on the right track. Ok, thanks a lot Adam. That helps very much.

[LSATls]

I was thrown by the explanation provided above that (B) was not arguing for a restriction of an action. I thought saying that the scientist is not the only one who should be allowed to profit did suggest a restriction -- a restriction, that is, of the scientist's sole ability to profit. Similarly, if I said that Party A is not the only party who should be allowed to run in the upcoming election, I'm suggesting that Party A should be restricted from a certain action (namely, running as the sole party in the upcoming election).

So in my reading, (B) provided a scenario where an action was being restricted. In order to conform to the principle stated in the stimulus, (B) would need to provide an example of how this restriction prevents negative effects on others. Since the claim that "there is no evidence that allowing others to profit from this technology will reduce the scientist's own profits" does not express a case of harm to others, I concluded that (B) was inconsistent with the principle.

[Jeremy Press]

Hi LSATIs,

For this one, we need to return to the stimulus and let it guide us on what it means by restriction. The specific principle in the stimulus involves "restrict[ing] the performance of any of the actions of adults." That is the precise restriction the stimulus is concerned with. When answer choice B discusses keeping the scientist free from competition, that does not fairly fall within the meaning of "restricting the performance of any of the [scientist's] actions." Indeed, if others are permitted to profit from the technology, the scientist is still permitted to perform any/all of the actions the scientist was previously performing. You may say, "well, the scientist isn't permitted to receive as much profit." But that's not an action of the scientist, that's something (passive) that happens to the scientist. Answer choice B would be a better match had it discussed restrictions on others from profiting from technology (i.e. preventing them from taking the action of selling products using the technology, etc.). It's the narrower meaning of restriction that the stimulus gives that prevents us from reading answer choice B as an instance in which the principle applies.

I hope this helps!

Jeremy

[teddykim100]

Hello,

back to the actual stimulus itself, isn't "In order to" a sufficient condition indicator?

What tripped me up was how there seemed to be a conditional relationship nested in another conditional relationship -

A = "In order to encourage more personal responsibility. . ."
B = "society should not restrict. . . except to prevent negative effects on others"

this would make it --> If A (encourage more personal responsibility), then B

But statement "B" itself is also a conditional relationship:
"Society should not restrict. . . except to prevent negative effects"

Which becomes:
If society should restrict (B1), then it's to prevent negative effects on others (B2)

how do we then disregard the "in order to encourage more personal responsibility" at the beginning? What determines that the "nested" conditional relationship, is the one we would pay attention to? I'm asking for any future questions that may use multiple conditional indicators

[Robert Carroll]

teddykim,

I completely agree that the stimulus involves a nested conditional, and that you've diagrammed it correctly. You even did the Unless Equation (here necessitated by the word "except") exactly correctly. If you want to focus on a digrammatic analysis of this stimulus, consider that a conditional is false if and only if the sufficient condition is true and the necessary false. Since we have a nested conditional here, the necessary condition is false if and only if ITS internal sufficient condition is true and its internal necessary condition false. Thus, we should absolutely be focusing on a situation where the government messes with adults for a reason other than to prevent negative effects on others. That would violate the necessary condition of the entire stimulus (the necessary condition which is itself a conditional). If multiple answers seemed to do that, but one of them left it open whether the "in order to" statement was true, then we could reject such an answer based on that. Since that issue does not arise among these five answer choices, we can instead focus entirely on the necessary! To some extent, we get "lucky" here, but I think this just reflects the principle that we should make as little effort as possible in getting to the correct answer. The necessary condition of the entire stimulus allows us to eliminate every answer except answer choice (E). Thus, that's all we need to use for this question.

Robert Carroll