PT93.S2.Q21 - Essayist: Commitment to relationships or careers is commonly held to be virtuous.

legallyblondelawyer-1-1

This question was tough for me. I thought I didn't need the third sentence. Picked D but wasn't confident with it. Not sure how E is correct. Please help.

Steven_B-1

Hi, me again haha. I just did the PT today so im eager to discuss it.

I flagged this question as well because on my first pass, i wasn't 100% sure but okay let's tackle it.

It's a most justify question aka a PSA question meaning that we want our answer to strengthen our conclusion a whole bunch. The key is to identify the conclusion because that'll make it easier to see in which direction you have to strengthen the argument.

So the structure of this argument is:

1st sentence: Context/background info.They're just telling us that a common held view is that commitment to relationsihips or careers is considered virtuous. (This makes sense right? in life we usually see people who are committed as good apples. Okay let's see what we get next.

2nd sentence: This ends up being the main conclusion. It's important to notice the BUT which marks the pivot in the argument and introduces us to our author's position. So the author is concluding that ALL committments should be seen as morally neutral! (WOW, what a strong conclusion, they better give us great evidence to support this sweeping generalization). and also whichever answer we choose, it better strengthen this conclusion. This is our guide.

3rd sentence until the semicolon: Premise. The sentence starts with "after all" which is dead giveaway that this is a premise. So remember that this premise is in support of the main conclusion in our 2nd sentence. In simple words and connecting it back with the conclusion, this is just saying hey i believe that all commitments should be seen as morally neutral because we may be committed to things that are good or bad. (so the assumption here is that whether something is good or bad is relevant to the question of seeing something as morally good or morally neutral).

3rd sentence from the semicolon to the end: Just an illustration of our premise which allows us to more deeply understand the argument because it exemplifies the premise.

4th sentence: More support for the argument, the author is saying look there are at least some cases where committment is just defined by inertia. Meaning that sometimes we stay "committed" to things simply because we've been doing it for some time although the initial justification or reason why we did it, is no longer there. ( I think that's what they meant by this 4th sentence but overall we already know our main conclusion and so we can jump into the answer choices and look for something that strengthens it).

A - This is saying: Any commitment that is morally neutral ---> blah blah blah. Do you see why its wrong already? because the conclusion is on the wrong side. So this is immediately wrong. We need an answer thats going to say since X ----> any commitment is morally neutral.

B This establishes a biconditional relationship between committment being virtuous <---> relationship or career is good. But this wouldn't strengthen our argument about neutrality. Because if we plug this in, it doesn't make us believe with greater force that all commitmments should be seen as morally neutral. If anything, it makes me think that not all of them should be neutral.

C - This seems too narrow b/c its limited to determining whether each commitment deserves no praise, only then would the conclusion trigger that such specific committment is morally neutral. But the argument is making a much broader sweeping conclusion which is that ALL commitments should be seen as morally neutral. For this to be the right answer, we would have to know that all commitments are undeserving of praise because then it would follow that all are morally neutral. But we dont know that. There may be other reasons why this is wrong but that's what i noticed and immediately got rid of it.

D - so this is playing on that last sentence but just based on the second part of the sentence you can tell this is wrong because this answer choice would be strengthening an argument that is trying to conclude that certain commitments cannot be virtous. But our argument is trying to claim that they are all morally neutral. That's just based on a mechanical analysis. But even on the substance, this doesn't help because if we apply this to the argument then it just leads to a random implication that sometimes there are committments that have outlasted their original justification and therefore those are not virtous. But that doesn't move the needle towards the direction we need it to.

E - IF there are any (read as at least 1) commitments that are undeserving of praise ---> all commitments are morally neutral.

Okay E seems promising because the conclusion is in the correct place but now we need to make sure that we can pull the trigger on this conditional based on the information provided in the passage. If we can pull the trigger, meaning that the facts after IF are included in the passage, then we will strengthen our conclusion.

The passage specifically gives us an example of a commitment undeserving of praise (a relationship that benefits none of the parties involved). This means that we can pull the trigger and support our conclusion.

I was a little confused with E at first because I thought, well they gave us this example but does this actually mean that there ARE such examples in the real world lol. But after analyzing the answer choices, i went with E.

For these questions, sometimes the mechanical approach can be beneficial although its always MORE important to understand the argument. but just on the mechanics, once I find the conclusion, i look to see if any answer choices lead me directly to the answer choice and if the sufficient condition aka the trigger is activated.

Hope this helps. I'm happy to chat more about other questions. You can message me if you want. I'm prepping for next weekend so this is helpful for me as well.