Q19 - Arbitrator: The shipping manager admits

[legalrabbithole]

Could someone please walk me through this problem? I chose E because I didn't like the other answer choices.

I don't see how A is the correct answer since it doesn't seem to hit on the key issue of responsibility/blame.

[LSAT-Chang]

Hello!
I'll try and explain why the answer is clearly not (E), but (A).

(E) actually goes against the conclusion since it states that "ONLY a manager should be held responsible for a project's failure" but the conclusion never says that. In fact, it clearly says that "but he, TOO, is to blame" so there is someone else besides him that needs to be blamed who is the contractor in this case.

So the general conclusion of the argument is that the contractor is not the ONLY one to be blamed, but ALSO the manager as well -- and the reason for this is because "he was AWARE of the contractor's typical delays and should have planned for this contingency." Answer choice (A) gives us a principle that fits pretty well with the argument since the author is assuming something along the lines of "if you are aware of the unwanted consequences of something, then you are also to blame". If we tried inserting answer choice (A) in the argument, it would look like this:

The manager was aware of the contractor's typical delays and should have planned for this contingency. A manager should take foreseeable problems into account when making decisions. The manager is also to blame since he basically overlooked it even if he was aware of it.

I was honestly looking for an answer choice something along the lines of the assumption I made above (which includes the word "blame/responsible" like you said), but you can see that B through E are terrible answers, so (A) would be one of those answer choices that we would pick since it is the "BEST" even though we aren't 100% satisfied with.

Just for further clarification (if needed), in answer choice (A), the "foreseeable problems" would be the "awareness of unwanted consequences (which in this case is the contractor's typical delays)" and the "making decisions" would be the manager's decision to schedule the new facility's opening for Oct 17.

Let me know if you have further questions!!

[WaltGrace1983]

I got (A) and was able to easily eliminate (B) - (E) when I was doing timed drills. However, when I am reviewing (C), I cannot eliminate it very easily. Is (C) wrong because of the vagueness of "promptly?" After all, all we know is that the contractor didn't finish "on time" but maybe he had a very small window of time that wasn't enough to begin with? I guess you could say that the conclusion weakens this possibility but what if the "typical delays" are typical of any contractor?

[mjacob0511]

The shipping manager admits that he "decided"... but he blames it on the contractor for not finishing on time.

C: He too is to blame because he was aware of the contractors typical delays and should have taken it into account.

(A) Perfect. It's typical of the contractor to delay things, and the manager was aware of this, so when he "decided" to open on the 17th, it's partly his fault. He should have foreseen the possibility of a delay and planned contingently.
(B) Who cares if a manager should be able to depend on anyone, and if he should be able to, then he shouldn't be blameworthy. It's not his fault if a person he should have been able to depend on, was negligent in his duties.
(C) Yes maybe the manager should see to it, but is he blameworthy if the contractor was negligent?
(D) Directly supervises? Also argument says he claims he's not responsible and he places blame on someone else, but blame should go on him TOO. Does that make him responsible.
(E) Only a manager? Even the arbitrator doesn't deny the responsibility of the contractor.

[maryadkins]

Thanks for weighing in!

I like your explanations of (A) and (E). Let me add a bit to (B), (C), and (D) however.

(B) is the opposite of what we want. The manager is also blameworthy because he should have anticipated the delays, not because he should have counted on the work being prompt.

(C) misses the point. The point is that he should have anticipated the delay and planned for it, not that he should have made the contractor work faster.

(D) brings in "directly supervises" which, as you note, isn't what we're talking about here. So it is out of scope.

[bodoalexandra]

I still can't seem to understand why C is wrong. Doesn't "seeing to it that contractors do their jobs promptly" fall under the general category of "planning for this contingency"? I feel like the issue for me is whether these two ideas are equivalent in the way that "planning for this contingency" is equivalent to "taking foreseeable problems into account when making decisions." Or is it something else? Thanks in advance!

[maryadkins]

I don't see planning for a contingency necessarily the same as making sure a contingency doesn't happen. A contingency by definition is a future event that cannot be predicted. If you could predict and prevent it it wouldn't be a contingency. That's why when people say a "contingency plan" they mean a plan B. (C) just states that the manager shouldn't have had a problem in the first place, but the conclusion is more realistic. The conclusion says he should have planned around the problem. They may overlap, sure, but they certainly don't line up perfectly.

[JorieB701]

The question stem asks,

"Which one of the following principles underlies the arbitrator's argument?"

Are we supposed to look at this similar to a necessary assumption of the argument?

[JorieB701]

Okay, so this question is in the LR strategy guide, 5th edition, Principle Support Questions:

In talking about the correct answer for this question they say:

---"(A) This looks pretty good, since the arbitrator does say that the manager 'should have planned for this contingency.' But wasn't that just a premise? Aren't we looking for a principle that gets us to the conclusion that the manager is to blame?"---

They then go on to say that it's okay because the argument actually has an intermediate conclusion:

shipping manager was aware of contractor's typical delays --> he should have planned for this contingency --> he shares blame with contractor

(So, it strengthens the arrow between the first premise and the intermediate conclusion)

Okay, so my question is, "whoa, what?"
If there wasn't an intermediate conclusion would this not have been the correct answer? What would this answer choice actually be doing to this argument? Would it just kind of be a premise booster? If there wasn't an intermediate conclusion would we have needed something that more clearly bridges the gap between the premises and who should therefore have the blame?

[ohthatpatrick]

You're asking good questions, but I wouldn't try to get more technical with this question.

It's a very atypical question stem ... "what principle underlies the argument" isn't quite the same task as
"Which principle, if valid, most justifies the argument?"

If we just approach these answer choices thinking, "Which of these sounds the most like what this author was arguing?", then (A) wins.

(C) would seem tempting, but the author doesn't seem to specifically think the contractor needed to hurry the contractor up. The author seems to allow for another potential solution: don't close the old facility down until you know the new one will be ready to open.

The reality is that most correct answers to Principle-Support / Principle-Conform questions feel like Prem -> Conc BRIDGE ideas, but some of them just feel like "general rule-of-thumb" strengtheners.

I think the book's explanation is trying to make a technical point, but it makes this more complicated than it needs to be.