Logical Reasoning

PT120 · S1 · Q13 All societies recognize certain rules

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All societies recognize certain rules to be so crucial that they define those rules as duties, such as rules restricting violence and those requiring the keeping of agreements.

Background

All societies have certain rules that are so crucial they're called "duties".

The idea of "duty" is that it's so important that you have to do it even if doing it would be harmful to your self-interest.

Evaluate

The phrase "this shows that" tells us that we're trying to draw a conclusion. This is typically what we're doing on Logical Completion, and we want to use our Inference brain to think about what a safely worded conclusion would sound like.

We also want to use our Inference brain in the sense that the correct answer will feel like it's synthesizing two or more claims. This argument only has two claims. Is there any overlapping information?

Yes, "duty" is talked about in each claim.

All societies have duties. Duties are so important to a properly functioning society that you have to do them even if they're harmful to your self interest.

So we could fuse those together and say something like, .

Goal

It's hard to get a great feel for where this would be headed, but we want to think like we do on Most Supported questions: pick whichever answer feels most provable based on what we read. Beware strong language or out of scope ideas.

13.

Which one of the following most reasonably completes the argument?

  1. all societies overrate the benefits

    Out of Scope: overrate benefits

    We don't have any support for this opinionated, and judgmental tone of "all societies overestimate how beneficial certain rules are". The paragraph doesn't talk about the benefit of having certain rules or give us any reason to think it's less benefit than all societies think.

    2% picked this

  2. all societies have certain rules

    Too Strong: all people incapable

    Did we hear about any rule that "no person is capable of following"? Doesn't seem like it. We just heard about duties, such as refraining from violence or keeping an agreement. Do we have any reason to think that "no person is capable of refraining from violence or keeping an agreement"? The fact that duties can sometimes mean that people would have to go against their own self-interest might tempt us into thinking, "Oh, people won't want to go against their self-interest. Thus no person is capable of following this rule." But people are definitely capable of doing things that are harmful to their self-interest. They don't like doing it, but they're capable. And remember, this answer is not a single person is capable.

    1% picked this

  3. Correct

    all societies recognize the possibility

    Why this is right

    This is certainly weird, but it's not new and not very strong. Since all societies have duties, and contained in the notion of duty is that you have to follow it, even if doing so would harm your self-interest, then all societies have a notion that you might have to choose (a clash) between self-interest and duty.

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

    76% picked this

  4. a properly functioning society will

    Out of Scope: comparing duties

    There's nothing in the argument that suggests that some duties outrank other ones. We were told that duties can outrank self-interest, but we never talked about one duty coming into conflict with another duty.

    20% picked this

  5. societies have no right to

    Too Strong: societies have no right

    Similar to (A), this answer is imbued with a lot of judgmental opinion, but the background claims don't have any opinion at all. We're not allowed to speculate how someone might react to the background claims in an opinionated way. If we didn't read opinions in the stimulus, then we would (almost always) avoid opinions in the answers.

    1% picked this

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