Logical ReasoningDifficulty: Hard

PT123 S3 Q24 Explanation

Sociologist: Romantics who claim

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Logical Reasoning question.

TopicsPrinciple-Strengthen

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Stimulus

Sociologist: Romantics who claim that people are not born evil but may be made evil by the imperfect institutions that they form cannot be right, for they misunderstand the causal relationship between institutions are merely collections of people.

What this question is testing

Principle-Strengthen

Your task

Break the argument into its conclusion and evidence, then do exactly what the question stem asks with that structure.

Common trap

Answers that sound relevant to the topic but don't connect to the argument's actual reasoning.

Winning move

Predict what a right answer must do, then test each choice against the conclusion-evidence gap.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
24.

Which one of the following principles, if valid, would most help to justify

Answer choices

  1. Irrelevant Comparison6% picked this

    People acting together in institutions can do more good or evil than can

    Whether institutions or individuals can create more good or evil in the world is not relevant to assessing whether the people

  2. Too Weak15% picked this

    Institutions formed by people are inevitably

    This falls short of answering the question whether it is the people who make an institution evil or the institution that makes people evil.

  3. Too Weak5% picked this

    People should not be overly optimistic in their view of individual

    That people should not be overly optimistic in their view of human beings does not go far enough to establish that people are born evil.

  4. Out of Scope13% picked this

    A society’s institutions are the surest gauge of that

    Gauging a society’s values is not the same as establishing the source of those values.

  5. Correct61% picked this

    The whole does not determine the properties of the things that

    Why this is right

    While this does not establish that it is the members of a group that make a group evil, it does rule out an alternative possibility that it is the group that makes the members of the group evil.

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

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