Logical Reasoning

PT10 · S1 · Q18 People cannot be morally responsible

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People cannot be morally responsible for things over which they have no control.

Claims

conditional (cannot be X for things like Y)

Have no control → can't be morally resp.

conditional (any)

inevitable conseq → can't be morally resp. of uncontrollable thing

wishy-washy application of 1st rule

It's hard to know whether adults have control over how they're treated, and thus it's hard to know whether they bear responsibility for how they're treated.

strong statement (everyone) / pivot (however)

We all sometimes act in ways that are an inevitable consequence of how we were treated as an infant.

Infants cannot control, and so are not morally responsible for the treatment they receive.

Evaluate

It's a safe bet that the 3rd and 4th sentences are just filler. We're doing a Must Be True question and these claims are nebulous: "it's hard to say".

Meanwhile, it's very typical for Must Be True to test our ability to combine early and late ideas, with the filler in the middle being the way they distract us.

We're keenly attuned to Overlapping Language on Inference questions, and the last couple ideas about infancy are invoking language used in the rules of the first two sentences.

Everyone sometimes acts in ways that are an inevitable consequence of treatment received as an infant. According to rule 2, we're not supposed to be held morally responsible for any inevitable consequences of things over which we have no control.

Can we apply rule 2 then? Is the "treatment received as an infant" a "thing over which we have no control"?

Yes, we are told in the final two claims that infants clearly cannot control the treatment they receive.

Goal

So if we apply rule 2 to the claim that , then we can say that .

18.

Anyone making the claims above would be logically committed to which one of the following further claims?

  1. An infant should never be

    Too Strong: never

    The way we can prove that "you shouldn't be held morally responsible" is if we know that "you have no control over X", or "X is an inevitable consequence of something you have no control over". Do we know that infants have no control over anything? We don't. We know they have no control over how they're treated, but maybe they have control over how they treat others (this sounds ridiculous, of course, but in LSAT must be true terms we can't make assumptions). So it's still possible that infants should be held morally responsible for some actions .

    22% picked this

  2. There are certain commonly performed

    Out of Scope: commonly performed

    We know that everyone sometimes acts in ways for which they should not be held morally responsible (because those actions are an inevitable consequence of how they were treated as an infant, over which they had no control). But we don't know if any of these actions are "common performed actions".

    10% picked this

  3. Adults who claim that they

    Out of Scope: held partially responsible

    This paragraph only gives us tools for claiming that in certain circumstances people are not morally responsible or should not be held responsible. We don't have any mechanism that says, "In situations like X, people should be held (at least partially) responsible". The fact that this answer seems most related to the wishy-washy language in sentences 3 and 4 should also make it pretty unattractive.

    2% picked this

  4. If a given action is

    Illegal Negation

    This paragraph only gives us tools for claiming that in certain circumstances people are not morally responsible or should not be held responsible. We don't have any mechanism that says, "In situations like X, people should be held responsible". This answer seems to just be doing an illegal negation of the first sentence. We were told, "If X isn't under your control, then you can't be morally responsible for X", so this is illegally switching that into, "If X is under your control, then you should be held morally responsible for X".

    27% picked this

  5. Correct

    No adult should be held

    Why this is right

    We know that "everyone sometimes acts in ways for which they should not be held morally responsible" (because those actions are an inevitable consequence of how they were treated as an infant, over which they had no control). So since everyone sometimes has actions that they shouldn't be held morally responsible for, we can re-state that as "No one is ever morally responsible for 100% of their actions". This answer is saying, "Every adult has at least one action for which they should not be held morally responsible".

    Skill tested: Must be True · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    40% picked this

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