Q10

[peg_city]

Can someone explain to me why B is wrong?

Both A and B look right to me....

[giladedelman]

Thanks for posting.

To figure out what claim the defenders of punitive bankruptcy laws would agree with, we have to go back to the passage's description of their views. Luckily it's all condensed in the second paragraph. Apparently their position was that excessive debt was your own damn fault, and if you couldn't pay up, you were breaking a contract. Throwing debtors in jail was a way to remove these contract-violators from society.

Okay, now let's take a look at the answer choices.

(A) is pretty much a rephrasing of my little summary up there: excessive debt is a moral failing and you should be punished for it.

(B) is tempting, but it's incorrect because, as portrayed in the passage, the defenders of punitive bankruptcy laws made no mention of insolvency harming the entire economy. Also, they don't talk about punishment as a deterrent, they talk about it removing unsavory types from society. But a deterrent is meant to prevent a problem, not remove it.

(C) contradicts the views in question and somewhat supports the other side of the scale.

(D) goes into the dissolution of a large corporation thing, and frankly, I'm not even reading that part right now because I know it does not have anything to do with the views that we're being asked about.

(E) is likewise out of scope; again, this has something to do with the author's views, but not with the views of people who supported punitive laws.

Does that clear this one up for you?

[LSAT-Chang]

(A) is pretty much a rephrasing of my little summary up there: excessive debt is a moral failing and you should be punished for it.

One quick question.. I also picked (B) for this one but for a very different reason. I eliminated (A) right off the bat because it was a rephrasing just like you said. To me, because the question stem asks us "which one of the following claims would a defender of the punitive theory of bankruptcy legislation be most likely to have made?" So I thought it was asking us something OTHER than that was in the passage, which could still be on the same "side" of the argument as what they say in the second paragraph, but just something "similar" not the exact phrasing. So I thought (A) was wrong since it just reiterates their view. Will it NEVER be the case that they will ask us to infer something that is not written in the passage? Also, in regards to (A), where did "moral failing" come from? I thought that was also a bit too extreme -- that it is "ultimately a moral failing". I couldn't find any reference to this word..

[marshal_of_grey]

Are we to interpret "likely to have made" to mean they would make as part of their position as characterized by the author? I took it to mean an argument they would make against the author of the passage given the author's reasoning. I see now that that's probably not the best way to read this, but I want to make sure that that's what I misunderstood.