PTA S4 Q25

LoraxMan

I'm having trouble with the following question from Superprep, A:

L: People's intentions cannot be, on the whole, more bad than good. Were we to believe otherwise, we would inevitably cease to trust each other, and no society can survive without mutual trust among its members.

Stem: Most vulnerable to which of the following criticisms?

A (correct) - It fails to rule out the possibility that a true belief can have deleterious (harmful) conseuqences


My analysis:

The author claims that if we believe that intentions are more good than bad, we would cease to trust one another and as a result without this mutual trust we would not survive. We are surviving, so we must not have the belief that that intentions are more good than bad.

There is clearly a gap between believing and the truth of a statement, but I cant put my finger on the flaw. I would normally say that the flaw is that just because a belief can't be true, doesn't mean that the underlying element can't be true. This, however, doesn't line up with the flaw stated in A.

c.janson35

The argument doesn't say that a society would automatically cease to survive if there isn't trust, and who's to say that we are surviving, or more specifically, that Louis' society is surviving? Or maybe it is the case that the statement is true and we are eventually going to cease trusting each other, but right now we still trust one another. In any case, your first intuition was correct: beliefs do not necessarily mean truths, and there's nothing to say that a belief can't be true even if it has negative implications.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

LoraxMan

I got caught up in adding in an implied assumption, thanks