PT54.S2.Q17 - ethicist: the penalties for drunk driving

Ballon d'Or

https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-54-section-2-question-17
Can someone help me to understand answer choice (B)?

I understood it to mean that the criteria of legal responsibility are different from that of moral responsibility, but Jon's explanation says that the criteria of legal responsibility include some of the stuff that moral responsibility does.

Thank you!

quinnxzhang

On a crude interpretation, (B) is saying that the criteria for moral responsibility and the criteria for legal responsibility overlap at least in part, but are not the same. On a stricter interpretation, (B) says that the criteria for moral responsibility are a proper subset of the criteria for legal responsibility. In other words, intentions are part of the criteria for legal responsibility, but not the entire part.

However, we simply can't presume this from reading the stimulus. We don't know if the criteria for legal responsibility has anything to do with intentions/the criteria for moral responsibility. The stimulus doesn't rule out, for example, the possibility that moral responsibility depends entirely on intentions and legal responsibility depends entirely on consequences.

runiggyrun

The only claim in the stimulus is that legal responsibility depends sometimes on factors other than intention, and it is different from moral responsibility (which depends solely on intent). It's easy to assume that this means that legal responsibility criteria include moral responsibility ones, plus other factors, but that's not what the conclusion actually says. There's no explicit statement that these other factors are "in addition" to anything.
Answer B plays on this easy to make confusion. It mis-states the claim to be "the criteria of legal responsibility for an action include but are not the same as those for moral responsibility". The "includes but" is what makes B wrong.

runiggyrun

@quinnxzhang I need to stop posting at the same time as you - your explanation was great