#21 - Ethicist: A person who treats others well is more worthy of praise if this treatment

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Cannot Be True. The correct answer choice is (C).

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C): This is the correct answer choice.

Answer choice (D):

Answer choice (E):

This explanation is still in progress. Please post any questions below!

[Cflores17]

Can you explain the conditionality sequence of this question? I am confused on how it works.

[nicizle]

I completely guessed on this question and happened to be correct. Nonetheless, I am completely lost. I'd appreciate a complete answer explanation for this, as all of the answers looked unattractive to me. I only picked C because I felt it directly contradicted the notion that someone who is at least partially motivated by feelings of compassion is more deserving of praise than someone who merely felt morally obligated to do something.

I don't really see how B could be true especially, as the stimulus gives no conditional framework for us to conclude what doesn't deserve praise.

[Jeff Wren]

Hi Cflores and nicizle,

This question is a Cannot Be True question, which is fairly uncommon in Logical Reasoning. It also involves some tricky conditional reasoning.

The stimulus starts with a wordy/compound conditional statement. One way to diagram this statement is:

TOW + TLPMFC -> MWP

which means: if a person treats others well (TOW) and the treatment is at least partially motivated by feelings of compassion (TLPMFC), then that person is more worthy of praise (MWP)

Note - It's fine to add the part of "than entirely motivated by cold and dispassionate concern...," but isn't really necessary and these terms are already rather wordy. Also, you could simplify the diagram of the second sufficient term to "FC" for "feelings of compassion," as long as you remember that the feelings of compassion must motivate the good treatment.

The second sentence of the stimulus tells us that a person can choose what is morally right but cannot choose to have feelings.

In this sentence, the second part (cannot choose to have feelings) is the conditional part that we want to focus on and diagram. "Cannot" is a negative conditional indicator.

This can be diagrammed:

F -> Not PC

which means: if a person has a feeling, then that person cannot/didn't choose (to have that feeling)

and the contrapositive would be:

(PC -> Not F)

which means: if a person has a choice (about something), then that thing is not a feeling

Now, back to our first diagram, it's important to notice that "feels compassion" (FC), which is part of our second sufficient term, is a feeling (F), and so it triggers the second conditional diagram.

In other words, you can combine the two diagrams like this:

TOW + (TLPMFP -> Not PC) -> MWP

Generalizing from the diagram, what is happening in the stimulus is that something that a person cannot choose (specifically, feelings of compassion) is being used to determine whether something is more or less praise worthy.

Since this is a Cannot Be True question, we need to find an answer that contradicts this conditional statement. The one thing that cannot be true based on a conditional statement is the sufficient condition occurring without the necessary (or the sufficient condition occurring with the exact opposite of the necessary).

With this in mind, let's examine Answer C.

This answer can be diagrammed:

MPW -> PC

which means: if something should be used to measure praiseworthiness (MPW), then it must be subject to that person's choice (PC)

and the contrapositive would be:

(Not PC -> Not MPW)

which means: if something is Not subject to that person's choice (Not PC), then it should Not be used to measure praiseworthiness (Not MPW)

The contrapositive directly contradicts the stimulus, because the stimulus used something that is Not subject to that person's choice (the feelings of compassion) to measure praiseworthiness, but this answer says you cannot do this. Since this answer directly contradicts the stimulus, it Cannot Be True according to the stimulus and is therefore the correct answer.

One of the many tricky parts of this question is that the specific terms in the conditional statements don't perfectly match in terms of diagramming, but they are related. For example, you need to realize that "feelings of compassion' in the first conditional is related to "feelings" in the second conditional. Also, you need to realize that concluding that something is "more worthy of praise" in the first conditional is the violating the term "it should Not be used to measure praiseworthiness" in Answer C.

As for the wrong answers, any answer that does not directly violate the conditional rules in the stimulus could be true based on the stimulus, even if the answer has nothing to do with the stimulus. For example, if you saw an answer that states "Grass is green," that could be true according to the stimulus (since it doesn't directly contradict the stimulus) and therefore is wrong.

Here none of the other answers directly contradicts the stimulus. Many of these answers have terms that are similar to those in the stimulus, but none directly contradicts the conditional statements in the stimulus. Also, answers that have Mistaken Reversals or Mistaken Negations do not directly contradict the stimulus and therefore could be true, so are wrong.