Q9 - Fines levied against those responsible

[weiyichen1986]

Dear people,

Can you explain to me why A is correct, i just feel A requires a lot of extra assumption, and too broad?

[zl7391e]

What if businesses cannot predict those accidents? The argument falls flat. A is something close to that, and A is the best one out of five. Think about the financial crisis. People greatly underestimate the risk of a certain financial product (mortgage-backed security); thus they downplay the likelihood of potential damages it would incur. Look at what it got us into.

Now the answer to a weaken question does not need to destroy an argument; it only needs to shed a reasonable doubt about it. If A is true, then even though businesses value their profits, they are less likely to take seriously those accidents (think about the extremes that those business value the risk of future accidents to be zero so that they would never happen.)

Hope it helps.

[yama_sekander]

i narrowed it down to A and D. i am wondering why d is wrong because if they treat the fines as ordinary business expense, then it can be inferred that it these fines are assumed as part of everyday business practice. this, then would weaken the argument that the business will install environmental safeguards.

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

Hey Yama!

Thanks for bringing this one back up for discussion! We're asked to weaken the argument and answer choice (D) actually strengthens the argument - though we have to drop the "off the cuff" way of interpreting answer choice (D).

The argument concludes that businesses that might have environmentally damaging accidents will now install adequate environmental safeguards. The problem with this conclusion is that it fails to consider that there may be a ton of businesses out there who don't think they have a chance of such an accident, but who in fact do. Answer choice (A) weakens this argument by pointing out this possibility.

Let's look at the incorrect answers:

(B) strengthens the argument. Maybe businesses are more concerned with short-term profits? That would weaken the argument by saying that maybe the businesses don't have a far enough time-horizon. This answer choice takes that possibility away.
(C) is consistent within the argument.
(D) strengthens the argument. If fines are treated as a regular business expense, then the fines will count directly against that year's profits. I hope this doesn't feel like it needs a degree in accounting, but an expense is not good for the company!
(E) doesn't imply that they will neglect or misjudge the risk of the need for environmental safeguards.

Let me know if you still have further questions on this one!

[WaltGrace1983]

I was going fairly slow on this one so I am going to write out my own explanation for my own benefit.

To pay for the fine incurred from the accident costs a company more than to adopt measures to prevent the accident in the first place
+
Businesses care about profits
→
Businesses that might have accidents will install safeguards to help prevent those accidents

My initial thought process was that maybe businesses care more about reducing the upfront expense of buying the environmental safeguards. However, this misses the point a bit because the fine itself is also an upfront (or short-term) expense. Thus, my thinking was off here. This was not the way to approach the question, I suppose.

A better thought process would have been to think about motivation. We know that businesses "value their profits." Thus, we know that businesses will do a lot in order to maximize those profits. Following from this, whose to say that the businesses are going to pay for something that may or may not happen? Maybe these businesses are more okay with taking a risk: acknowledging that, although it will cost more money to pay the fine, they may not have to pay anything IF there is no accident in the first place.

(A) If businesses "generally greatly" (look at how wide of a net this is - very good for weaken questions) underestimate the risk of accidents, this would provide reasoning for why they would NOT install the environmental safeguards. After all, those businesses probably think, "There probably won't be any accident so I am going to save that $$$."

(B) This answer choice was designed to manipulate the very thoughts I was initially having. However, this actually doesn't do anything except perhaps strengthen the argument. If businesses are JUST AS concerned with long-term vs. short-term ways of making profit, they probably will install the safeguards. This is because the businesses would know that this would be good in the long-term and they are concerned about what happens in the long-term!

(C) I thought this was more tempting than it probably should have been. (Businesses generally do the right thing → makes good business sense) is what (C) is saying. However, this is all turned around. We don't want to say what will happen AFTER the conclusion. Let me explain. The conclusion is that "those that might have accidents...install safeguards." This would probably be equated to the "right thing" mentioned in (C). However, (C) utilizes the argument's conclusion as the answer choice's premise. This gets us nowhere.

(D) This doesn't weaken and it may strengthen. We now businesses want to maximize profits (thus, they'd like to decrease expenses). Who cares what they categorize the fines as? Either way, they want to reduce those expenses! So it actually makes more sense, if we accept (D), that the argument's conclusion would result - they want to reduce expenses so they would probably install the safeguards once rather than having potentially multiple accidents in the future!

(E) This would imply that they want to look good for the public. Having environmental safeguards would probably do this.

Once again, the explanation above was sufficient but I wanted to make sure I truly got this question. If it helps, awesome.