PT17.S2.Q15 - To perform an act that is morally wrong

alexanderthegreat4-2-1-1

Hey everyone,
I been looking at this argument for a couple days and can't find the flaw. Can someone please help me find it. Thank you.

Admin note: edited title; please use the format of "PT#.S#.Q# - [brief description]"

Admin note: https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-17-section-2-question-15/

Logician

Hey there, are you referring to the principle question about morality? or did you mean question 16- the parallel flaw question about the council election?

alexanderthegreat4-2-1-1

I meant question q.15. It starts with to perform an act that is morally is to offend against humanity.

Logician

Hmm... i'm not quite sure if there is a flaw, at least if we are looking at this with our LSAT lens on.
We are given the conditional MW --> OH ---> EB and then told that murder is morally wrong which means if its murder its equally bad, i.e killing 1 is just as bad as killing 100. Of course this is an erroneous or flawed way of thinking in the real world, but I don't think there's an LSAT flaw that particularly matches this. It seems like an appeal to extremes fallacy, maybe it could also be disproved by a reduction to absurdity (Reductio ad Absurdrum).

So if we assume the premises/principal is true (anything morally wrong is an offense against humanity and all offenses against humanity are equally bad) and we say that flipping off a stranger is morally wrong, then of course it would be as equally bad as any other act that is morally wrong. So if we then say murder is morally wrong, then we'd be concluding that murdering someone is equally as bad as flipping someone off (which of course would be absurd in the real world and we know is false in the real world). Therefore we'd arrive at a contradiction because it cant both be true and false (based on the principle:true + our real world knowledge:false).

firefistcaes

I wouldn't say there's a flaw here. I wanna say this is principle question based off how the stem reads, but I may be wrong (I've lost some sharpness since taking the LSAT). Therefore, we just need an answer choice that matches the principle stated in the stimulus (in this case the conditional chain below).

Morally Wrong -> Offend Humanity -> All Equally Bad

Murder is morally wrong. ANY Morally wrong action is an offense against humanity, and ANY offense against humanity are all equally bad, regardless if it was murder against 1 person or 100 people. As long as you're a morally wrong action (murder, stealing, lying, etc...), you're all equally bad.

Hopefully this steers you in the right direction.

alexanderthegreat4-2-1-1

Thanks everyone for your responses, they really help. I'm just practicing looking at every argument through a skeptical eye.

paul-a-s

Why isn’t it a problem that the correct answer choice doesn’t state that murder is morally wrong? Ordinarily I’d assume that murder is morally wrong, but ordinarily I’d also assume that lying is morally wrong. Since both the stimulus and the answer choice make a point of stating explicitly what is morally wrong, is seems problematic to assume any other actions are morally wrong.

In the stimulus, they tell us explicitly that a particular act is morally wrong, and then they extrapolate from that using the principle introduced early in the stimulus. But in choice A, we are asked to assume that murder is morally wrong. The only thing the choice tells us is that lying is morally wrong.

We could also assume that the “murder is morally wrong” part carries over from the stimulus to the answer choice, that also seems like a problem: it’s only an example given in the stimulus; it’s not the principle we’re being asked to apply to the AC.

Is this an example of older LSAT questions being a little looser in their structure and application of logic?