Moralist: A statement is wholly

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

TopicsPrinciple-Conform

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Stimulus

Moralist: A statement is wholly truthful only if it is true and made without intended deception. A statement is a lie if it is intended to deceive or if its speaker, misinterpreted, refrains from clarifying it.

What this question is testing

Principle-Conform

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

22.

Which one of the following judgments most closely conforms to the principles stated

Answer choices

Contradiction8% picked this
Ted's statement to the investigator that he had been abducted by extraterrestrial beings was wholly truthful even though no one has ever been abducted
The first principle in ~T or ID → ~WT the stimulus implies that any statement that is not true, is also not wholly truthful.
8%
Contradiction1% picked this
Tony was not lying when he told his granddaughter that he did not wear dentures, for even though Tony meant to deceive his granddaughter,
Since Tony meant to ID or (LM + ~C) → L deceive his granddaughter, the second principle implies that Tony was lying when he told his granddaughter that he did not wear dentures.
1%
Bad Trigger Match4% picked this
Siobhan did not tell a lie when she told her supervisor that she was ill and hence would not be able to come to
To prove that something wasn't wholly truthful, we need to know that either 1) it wasn't true or 2) it was made with intended deception The argument tells us that the statement was true, so #1 is out. And we are never given any reason to think that Siobhan's statement was intended to deceive. Since the evidence doesn't establish either of the trigger ideas, we can't conclude "not wholly truthful".
4%
Correct83% picked this
Walter's claim to a potential employer that he had done volunteer work was a lie. Even though Walter had worked without pay in his
Why this is right
This conforms to the second principle. The argument concludes L that Walter’s claim was a lie. The argument’s support ID is that Walter’s claim was intended to deceive.
Skill tested: Principle-Conform · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
83%
Contradiction4% picked this
The tour guide intended to deceive the tourists when he told them that the cabin they were looking at was centuries old. Still, his
According to the second ID or (LM + ~C) → L principle, any statement intended to deceive is a lie.
4%

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