PT61.S4.Q25 - there can be no individual freedom

ErlingRoald

Would anyone be willing to walk me through this one? I just can't step back enough to see it clearly and feel certain I understand (and I don't have access to the explanation video). Thank you!

https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-61-section-4-question-25/

LSATcantwin

Let's do this!

Conclusion: There can be no individual freedom without rule of law.

Why?

P1.) No individual freedom without social integrity.

P2.) Pursuing the good life is not possible without social integrity.

Okay well wtf does this even say. I'm not sure, what I do know right away is that the conclusion talks about "the rule of law" and it's never mentioned at all in the premise. So the AC I am looking for will talk about rule of law.

Time to get into some logic.

Conclusion: There can be no individual freedom without rule of law. /RL -> /IF contra IF -> RL

P1.) No individual freedom without social integrity. /SI -> /IF contra IF -> SI

P2.) Pursuing the good life is not possible without social integrity. /SI -> /PG contra PG -> SI

Okay so we have a nice tangled mess. What we need to do is find a way to link rule of law to individual freedom.

P1 talks about individual freedom right? What is individual freedom dependent upon? Social integrity.

Well let's see if we can use social integrity to link rule of law to individual freedom then.

The AC I'm looking for should talk about rule of law and social integrity.

AC B does that fairly nicely.

There can be no social integrity without the rule of law. /RL -> /SI contra SI -> RL

Lets do some linking now and see what happens.

IF -> SI (contra positive of P1)

+

SI -> RL (contra positive of the AC)

IF -> SI -> RL That looks nice and juice. Lets flip it and get our contra /RL -> /SI -> /IF

If I don't have rule of law, then I do not have social integrity. If I don't have social integrity I don't have individual freedom.

It's linked!!

I hope this helps a bit...

BinghamtonDave

This question is highly formulaic. It contains a form we should have experience with, it even employs a trick (as we shall see in a bit) that the occasional sufficient assumption question employs. I did this question because this category of sufficient assumption questions lend themselves nicely to being done over and over again.

Because this is review, it pays to be super thorough with our approach. This is a sufficient assumption question, invariably, our conclusion will be separated from our premise(s) by some sort of logical gap. It is our job to provide the answer choice that closes the gap and allows the conclusion to follow logically from the premise(s).

I should pause here and state that in real life this is sort of an odd task. Essentially, what we are doing is explicitly stating what the assumption that connects the premise with the conclusion is. So if I were to say:
John Stockton was an NBA point guard who holds the all time NBA record for assists and steals
Therefore, John Stockton is the greatest point guard in NBA history

In normal every day parlance, that isn't all that bad of an argument: a certain player holds records X and Y therefore that player is the greatest in their position of all time. On the LSAT, our job is to analyze that argument much more rigorously than we would in everyday communication. After all, isn't the argument saying that assists and steal are relevant to being a great point guard? After all, isn't the argument saying that points scored or rebounds are not the main/only determinants of a great point guard?

Now, in what kind of shapes and sizes can our sufficient assumption for the above argument come in? Well, we can have an over-encompassing sufficient assumption. Something like: if an NBA player holds more than 1 all time record in any statistic, that player is the greatest in history for their position. We could have a more precise sufficient assumption: if an NBA player in the position of point guard holds the all time record for assists and steals then that payer is the greatest point guard of all time.

With a bit of what I hope is helpful background in place, lets take a look at 61-4-25.
We are going to need 4 key skills for this question that are connected.

The first thing we want to do with this question is find our conclusion. Why? Because we want to know what it is we are building towards. The conclusion for this question takes a few seconds of digging around because it isn't explicitly stated with an indicator. Here, the conclusion is the first part of the first sentence:
If you have individual freedom then you have the rule of law.
How do we know that this is the conclusion? Because after the comma, we have the word "for." What comes after the word "for" in this sentence is offered as support for the conclusion.

Think about how they phrase this first sentence with our example above.
"John Stockton is the greatest point guard of all time, for he holds the all time record in assists and steals." So our first key skill is to locate the conclusion. The below lesson can assist in that:
https://7sage.com/lesson/quiz-grammar-1-answers/

Now, look close, what I wrote above isn't actually what the first sentence says. Why? Because I used our second key skill here to translate the first sentence into something I personally am more comfortable working with. Our second key skill is to take stock fo the conditional indicators and arrange the sentence into a manageable shorthand:
"Rule of law------>Individual Freedom"
Without is a group three indicator, which means we negate the sufficient condition. For more on this please see:
https://7sage.com/lesson/basic-translation-group-3/

So lets pause for a second. This is a special conclusion we have in this problem. The conclusion is a conditional statement. What the writers of this argument are trying to convince us of, is that something is necessary for something else. In other words:
If you have individual freedom then you have the rule of law.
Individual freedom---->Rule of law

Now, on what basis does the argument conclude that if you have individual freedom then you have the rule of law? What is the argument's support? The support comes after the "for." The support here is that "If you have individual freedom then you have social integrity." Again, we are applying our translation and then taking the contrapositive here, just like we did with our conclusion. For more on this please see:
https://7sage.com/lesson/the-contrapositive/

So, so far we have this:
Premise: If you have individual freedom then you have social integrity
IF---->SI
Conclusion: If you have individual freedom then you have the rule of law
IF---->RL

This argument takes the form of something straight out of our lessons. Here is where our key skill #3 comes into play:
https://7sage.com/lesson/quiz-on-finding-sufficient-assumptions-3-answers/?ss_completed_lesson=11891

Now, what about the rest of the stimulus, namely, what turns out to be the red herring? The sentence part that starts with ..."and pursuing..." is actually a conditional statement that is of no use to us: a trick. This conditional statement actually tells us after we translate it, what is sufficient for social integrity! "If pursue the good life---->social integrity" Our final key skill here is a bit of editorializing on my part. The test writers are this petty: they will indeed sneak an utterly irrelevant premise into our stimulus for no other reason but to distract us. We must resolve to be aware of this fact.

So lets look at our core argument here:
P: IF---->SI
C:IF---->RL
What is missing here is that all SI are RL.
SI----->RL
The inclusion of SI---->RL gives us:

Premise give by stimulus:IF---->SI
Premise we provided via correct answer:SI---->RL
Added together:IF---->SI---->RL
Conclusion given by stimulus:IF---->RL

The sufficient assumption for this question is stated in (B) via the contrapositive.

I hope this helps
David

LSATcantwin

@ErlingRoald maybe listen to @BinghamtonDave his explanation makes mine look like a 2nd grade noodle painting in comparison. O_O