Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Hard

PT141 S3 P4 Q24 Explanation

Regulating Voluntary Risk

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Reading Comprehension question.

TopicsAuthor OpinionLaw

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Passage

It is generally believed that while in some cases government should intervene to protect people from risk—by imposing air safety standards, for example—in other cases, such as mountain climbing, the onus should be on the individual to protect himself or herself. In the eyes of the public at large, the demarcation between antecedent judgment of some other kind. They are thus of little utility in guiding policy decisions.

First, it is not easy to determine when a risk is voluntarily incurred. Although voluntariness may be entirely absent in the case of an unforeseeable collision with an asteroid, with most environmental, occupational, and other social risks, it is not an all-or-nothing matter, but rather one of degree. Risks incurred by airline part of a complex interaction, not the decision to fly, but the accident when it occurs.

Second, people often characterize risks as "voluntary” when they do not approve of the purpose for which people run the risks. It is unlikely that people would want to pour enormous taxpayer resources into lowering the risks associated with skydiving, even if the ratio of dollars spent to lives saved were quite policy should be guided by a better understanding of the factors that underlie judgments about voluntariness.

In general, the government should attempt to save as many lives as it can, subject to the limited public and private resources devoted to risk reduction. Departures from this principle should be justified not by invoking the allegedly voluntary or involuntary nature of a particular considerations for which notions of voluntariness serve as proxies.

What this question is testing

Author Opinion

Your task

Pin down exactly what the question asks about the passage — a detail, the author's view, the structure, or the main point — before looking at the choices.

Common trap

Answers that restate a true detail from the passage but don't answer the specific question being asked.

Winning move

Anticipate the answer in your own words from the passage, then find the choice that matches that prediction.

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.

It can be inferred from the passage that the author would be most likely to agree with which one

Answer choices

  1. Too Strong Not the Author's Recommendation7% picked this

    People should generally not be protected against the risks incurred through activities, such as skydiving, that are dangerous and

    According to the final paragraph, the author thinks limited government money should be spent in whatever way would save the most lives. That is her big criterion (her causal difference-maker), not "whether or not the activity serves a socially useful purpose". If we could get a good lives per dollar value out of spending government money to save skydivers, she's fine with that.

  2. Correct58% picked this

    The fact that plane crash victims chose to fly would usually be deemed by policy experts to be largely irrelevant to decisions about the

    Why this is right

    The support for this comes from the middle of the 1st paragraph. The public at large thinks that government should intervene and spend money to make things safer if the risk is involuntary but less so (or not at all) if the risk is voluntary. But "this distinction between voluntary and involuntary may be the chief difference between lay and expert judgments. Policy experts tend to focus on aggregate lives at stake; laypeople care a great deal whether a risk is undertaken." This answer is saying, "experts would consider the voluntariness of people who chose to fly on a plane largely irrelevant, (because they tend to focus on aggregate lives at stake)"

    Skill tested: Author Opinion · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

  3. Too Strong: higher than any other4% picked this

    Both the probability of occurrence and the probability of resulting death or injury are higher for plane crashes than for any other kind

    This passage never says that being a passenger on an airplane is the riskiest activity done by airline passengers. (Common sense would tell us that most of these airline passengers probably drive or ride in cars, which have a much higher probability of resulting in death or injury)

  4. Contradicted, if anything19% picked this

    For public-policy purposes, a risk should be deemed voluntarily incurred if people are not subject to that risk unless

    The author said that voluntariness should not enter the discourse of public-policy purposes. Her final sentence of the 1st paragraph is that "Judgments about whether a risk is voluntary are of little utility in guiding policy decisions".

  5. Too Strong: main category12% picked this

    The main category of risk that is usually incurred completely involuntarily is the risk

    The author never names or singles out the #1 category of involuntary risk.

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