Q13 - If the purpose of laws is to contribute

[mshinners]

Question Type:
Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
P: If laws are meant to make people happy, we can judge them on that metric.
IC: If that's not the purpose, then we have no way to judge laws.
C: Laws are legit just because they're laws.

Answer Anticipation:
Whoa, crazy conditionals here. If you're lost, I'd recommend picking the answer that mentions sufficient/necessary conditions and moving on. It won't always work (it does here), but it's not a bad strategy.

Looking at an argument with an intermediate conclusion requires looking for gaps between the premise and IC, and the IC and main conclusion.

Premise to IC: There's a big jump here coming from the extreme nature of the second statement ("no basis"). The argument is treating happiness as the only possible valid basis for measuring laws. Without establishing that, there's a big gap there. This flaw can either be presented as a False Choice flaw, or a sufficient/necessary flaw ("It's either this or nothing" is a variety of an Illegal Negation; see discussion of (A) for more analysis on that front).

IC to Conclusion: Even without a basis for evaluation, something could gain legitimacy through other means than just existing. Enforcement, as an example.

Correct answer:
(A)

Answer choice analysis:
(A) As discussed in the Anticipation field, this is the "rule of thumb" answer for a question with conditional language. Let's break it down, though, and see also why one type of False Choice flaw aligns with Illegal Negations.

First, let's translate the answer choice: what is given as a sufficient condition for a given state of affairs? That first statement: laws having a purpose of happiness. What's the state of affairs it's sufficient for? Having a basis for analyzing laws, both old and new.

So rephrasing (A) gets us to: "takes treating happiness as the purpose for making laws as necessary for analyzing them." In other words, if you can't analyze laws for how happy they make people, then you can't analyze them. That's the intermediate conclusion! Which means we have our flaw - this answer says it jumps from a premise where something is treated as sufficient to a conclusion where it's treated as necessary.

So why are Illegal Negations and this False Choice flaw (It's either this or nothing) the same thing? Well, think about the Illegal Negation. If A means B, the illegal negation is Not A means Not B. In other words, A gets you B, and removing A prevents B, aka it's either A or nothing.

(B) Wrong flaw (Correlation/Causation). While the conclusion is causal, it isn't based on a correlation. If anything, it's based on ruling out an alternative cause.

(C) Wrong flaw (Equivocation). All the terms are used to mean the same thing throughout. Additionally, the main conclusion doesn't really overlap in terms with the premises.

(D) Wrong flaw (Term Shift/Degree). While the conclusion is about how the world is, the premises are not about how it "should be".

(E) Wrong flaw (Whole to Part). The argument is always talking about "laws" as a set, not as individual laws.

Takeaway/Pattern:
This is a complicated problem. When that happens, the rules of thumb can give you a good place to start your analysis. On this question, I'd spend extra time making sense of (A), even if my gut didn't like it, because it mentions the conditional language from the stimulus.

Also, there is overlap between the flaws - as categories, they're not always mutually exclusive.

#officialexplanation

[13trav]

Just out of curiosity then when we see an illegal negation in a question like this, a possible flaw present will always be of the taking a sufficient condition for a necessary one, correct? I realize other flaws could be present and thus not always the correct answer but wondering if I'm understanding it:

A-->B
Not A --> Not B so the contrapositive is B-->A

Thanks!

[lepivekovb611]

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[AasimY312]

Another way to think of this is the following:

The author states: PoL = CH --> BCEL

A valid or equivalent way of framing this is as the contrapositive: Not BCEL --> PoL not = CH.

But, the stimulus concludes: Not PoL = CH --> Not BCEL

Therefore, the conclusion takes a sufficient condition for a state of affairs (Not BCEL) and makes it necessary in the conclusion.