Q12 - The government is being urged

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Principle-Strengthen (which principle most helps to justify reasoning)

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: The fact that a group might be espousing dangerous nutritional advice is not a good enough reason for the government to silence the group.
Evidence: The government would not be justified silencing a political group that espoused some potentiall harmful policies. The same should hold for groups that discuss nutrition.

Answer Anticipation:
The most apparent concern with this problem is whether the analogy really holds. The government shouldn't silence a political group because of free speech protection. The government perhaps SHOULD silence potentially harmful nutrional information in much the same way that our free speech can be abridged to keep us from lying in advertisements. Tough to get an obvious "if PREM, then CONC" bridge idea prephrase on this one, so we can just focus on solidifying the author's two goals: make it fair to compare how the government deals with political groups / nutritional groups, or make us more convinced that we shouldn't silence a nutritional group just because it advocates a diet that could be hazardous.

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) "a signif portion of osicety believes this position to be beneficial --> government shouldn't silence it". The right side correctly matches the conclusion, but we can't trigger the left side. We don't know whether this uncooked meat diet is a position that a significant portion of society thinks is beneficial.

(B) Best interest of society --> govt should do it. We can get rid of this simply because the conclusion is about what the government should NOT do (do NOT silence the group), whereas this rule is about what the government SHOULD do.

(C) "advocate a position --> believe it's true or beneficial". This doesn't apply to the government at all. They're not advocating any positions. This sounds more like a rule for what the nutrional group should do.

(D) "only grounds is that opinion could be harmful if disseminated --> government shouldn't silence it". This looks good! The right side is a great match, and we can trigger the left side with what we were told. "Advocating a diet that includes something that can be very dangerous" = "disseminating an opinion that could be harmful".

(E) "govt isn't justified doing X --> shouldn't urge the govt to do X". We can throw this out immediately since it is not a rule we would apply to the government. It's a rule someone would apply to the people who are urging the government.

Takeaway/Pattern: The whole discussion of the political group (and its dubious relevance to a nutriotional group) turned out to be a red herring. We could use (D) to help justify the conclusion by simply applying what we know in the first sentence.

#officialexplanation

[js_martin01]

I'll try my hand at this one for those folks struggling to decode it.

Background information: The government is being pressured to put the kibosh on those human nutrition organizations advocating a diet that includes large amounts of meat, because eating uncooked meat can be dangerous.

Intermediate Conclusion: This fact does not justify the government's silencing these groups. Why? Read on...

P1: The government would not be justified in silencing political groups on the grounds that their policies/opinions could be harmful to some members of society.

Conclusion: The same principle should be true with regards to silencing groups with certain views on human nutrition.

Okay, so this is a principle question, which means that we want to take a broader approach heading to the question stem. We want to find a principle that will embody the essence of the argument, if you will. How do we do that? By finding an answer choice that will allow the author's argument to logically follow from it.

On to the answer choices:

(A) The start of this one looks good, but goes astray when it talks about proportion and benefit. The argument does not tell us that the government should not silence these groups' opinions if a significant proportion of society believe them to be harmful. Furthermore, nowhere in the argument does the author say anything about people's beliefs. So, this answer is irrelevant.

(B) "Best interest"? The argument does not use the idea that it would be in the best interest of society to not silence these human nutrition organizations. Eliminate.

(C) Again we see the test makers play on the use of "beneficial" in this answer choice. We are also told nothing about the truth of the advertisers views, so this is irrelevant to the author's argument. Eliminate.

(D) This is what we want. The government ought not to silence an opinion merely on the grounds that it could be harmful to disseminate the opinion. This answer choice encompasses the author's position, and justifies the reasoning in his argument. The key word in this answer is "harm", which is what the author's argument depends on. If we shouldn't do X on the basis that it can cause harm in this situation, then we shouldn't do Y for the same reason.

(E) I quickly eliminated this answer based on its prescription of what "one ought" to do. The argument does not assert that the government should do something - rather, it concerns what the government should not do. We also do not know what the government is, and isn't justified in doing, so this one is out.

HTH.

[maryadkins]

Great job!

[a3friedm]

I feel like I got a vocab lesson from this section with words like disseminate and "social intertia" from Q10.

I thought disseminate meant something like take apart (it means spread), which didn't make this answer choice very attractive. But it was still better than the rest

Thank goodness for the process of elimination.

[daniel]

I saw the argument core a little differently than what js_martin01 described.

Background information: The government is being pressured to put the kibosh on those human nutrition organizations advocating a diet that includes large amounts of meat, because eating uncooked meat can be dangerous.

Intermediate Conclusion: This fact does not justify the government's silencing these groups. Why? Read on...

P1: The government would not be justified in silencing political groups on the grounds that their policies/opinions could be harmful to some members of society.

Conclusion: The same principle should be true with regards to silencing groups with certain views on human nutrition.

Opposing claim (and its supporting premise):
P: Eating uncooked meat can be dangerous.
C: The government is being urged to silence organizations that advocate eating uncooked meat.

Author's claim (i.e., the conclusion):
C: That eating uncooked meat is purportedly dangerous does not justify silencing these groups.

Premises:
P1: The government would not be justified in silencing a purely political group on the grounds that the ideas could be harmful.

P2: The same should be true for silencing groups with certain views on nutrition.

I don't think the last sentence functions as a conclusion, because the author seems to be suggesting that the same principle used with respect to political groups should apply to nutrition groups, and this is used to support her main point.

[cvoldstad]

Thank you for these explanations.

I am having a little trouble with this question as E still somehow feels like an appealing answer.

From the stimulus we see that the government is being "urged to prevent organizations from advocating a diet..." and that however, given the parallel example of silencing political parties the government is "surely not justified in silencing" the meat group.

So don't we need the principle that one ought to urge the gov. to do only those things the gov. is justified in doing?? The other answer choices address the crux of this justification but aren't we talking about the populaces take on the application of this justification; our resultant urging??

[wj097]

I had a hard time finding a gap in this argument. Usually when I'm encountered with the principle justify Q, I try to find the keywords from each components of the argument(premises, conclusion), then match from the answer choice that would best close the gap of the imperfect argument.

However, in this argument it was pretty hard to find a gap. Possibly, where I first tried to tackle was the part saying "the same should be true for silencing groups with certain views on human nutrition". May be it's not perfectly valid to say what is right for political group is also right for organizations on human nutrition.

Other than this, I could not find one. Well, through Process of Elimination I was left (D) and (E), but (D) looked pretty obvious and redundant from what the part "for surely the government~" was saying. And after reading (E), that was when I came up with a thought that probably there has to be a connection between "something urged" and "government justify", from the first and second sentence, respectively.

Even when I was doing blind reviewing the question, I could not choose (D) as the correct answer. But I now see why (E) is the wrong answer. Maybe through a little justification for (D), I have come up with a theory of why it is what we need:

Even though we learned that we should not tackle what the premise is saying, if the premise is in the form of an argument by itself(without a good reason supporting it), it needs a premise (may be in the form of general principle) for it that makes us agree with it.

In this question's case, what gets my attention is "for surely". We can give a doubt by saying "how can you be so sure? may be that's not the case in totalitarian world?". Democracy may have ended the history, but if we assume that as all round truth, we are committing an error.

This is my theory for why (D) is the correct one, and once again I realize how LSAT writers can play a trick in my mind..

[erikwoodward10]

I eliminated E because the argument isn't concerned with what "one ought urge", rather with the action of the government. I find that a good strategy for these types of questions is to match up the stimulus with the answer choice in a conditional relationship. If the AC is true, then the stimulus is valid. So an AC telling us about what an individual would do really doesn't do much of anything for us, because the conclusion is concerned with the government.

Just a few thoughts, if this logic is incorrect please let me know!