Logical Reasoning

PT109 · S4 · Q21 Terry: Some actions considered

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Terry: Some actions considered to be bad by our society have favorable consequences.

Terry and Pat's Conclusion

Some bad actions are actually good.

Terry's Evidence

An action is good only if it has favorable consequences. ( good action → favorable consequences )

Some bad actions have favorable consequences.

Pat's Evidence

No actions considered bad have favorable consequences. ( bad action → ~favorable consequences )

Some good actions don't have favorable consequences.

Evaluate

You gotta love how erudite these two sound (), while totally botching conditional logic. It's also funny that Terry and Pat are two of the most androgynous names, so I'll randomly assign Terry a male pronoun and Pat a female one.

Whenever we're doing Flaw and see conditional logic trigger words (only if, no), then we should immediately suspect a Necessary vs. Sufficient illegal move, where the author does an illegal reversal or negation to get to their conclusion.

Terry is picturing these two ideas, some actions considered bad have favor conseq. favor conseq. → good and that's how he arrives at some actions considered bad are good

But of course we don't have a conditional that says "if favorable consequences, then good", we have the reverse of that.

Similarly, Pat is picturing these two ideas,

some good actions are not favor conseq. not favor conseq. → considered bad and that's how she arrives at some good actions are considered bad

But of course she didn't say that "if not favorable consequences, then considered bad", she said the reverse of that.

Goal

Since both authors are doing illegal reversals of the conditionals they provided, they are both confusing a Necessary condition with a Sufficient one.

21.

Which one of the following correctly describes both an error in Terry's reasoning and an error in Pat's reasoning?

  1. presupposing that if a certain

    Wrong Flaw

    This is definitely not describing an illegal backwards conditional move. It's saying that both authors made some flaw of thinking, "If X is a crucial difference between A and B, then there must be many differences between A and B." We can't match either part of that to their arguments.

    4% picked this

  2. presupposing that if most actions

    Wrong Flaw

    This is definitely not describing an illegal backwards conditional move. It's saying that both authors made some flaw of thinking, "If most actions of type X have property A, then all actions of type X have property A". We can't match either part of that to their arguments. It wasn't a "most vs. all" or "probably true vs. certainly true" type flaw.

    7% picked this

  3. presupposing that if a certain

    Wrong Flaw

    This is definitely not describing an illegal backwards conditional move. It's saying that both authors made some flaw of thinking, "Within society X, actions of type A always have property B, thus in all societies, actions of type A have property B." This would be a sampling flaw, assuming that what is true of one society is true of all societies. But neither author made a sampling flaw.

    5% picked this

  4. Correct

    presupposing that if an action’s

    Why this is right

    Seeing the words "necessary and sufficient" would be the shortcut for guessing this is our answer, since confusing Nec and Suff is just another way of saying "used a conditional statement backwards". To take Terry as an example, he established that "favorable consequences" is a property necessary of all good actions (good, only if favorable consequences). Then he says, "some bad actions have favorable consequences", and acts like that property is sufficient to prove that those bad actions are therefore a type of good action. Pat is saying that any action that is bad would be required to have the property of "no favorable consequences". She then says, "some good actions have no favorable consequences" and then proceeds to act like that property is sufficient to prove that those good actions are therefore a type of bad action.

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

    75% picked this

  5. presupposing that if a certain

    Wrong Flaw

    This is definitely not describing an illegal backwards conditional move. It's saying that both authors made some flaw of thinking, "If X is something that actions A and B have in common, then the only thing different about A and B from all other types of actions is X." We can't match either part of that to their arguments.

    9% picked this

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