PT16.S2.Q24 - uplandian supreme court

ChiTownGuy

Can someone help me out with this one? Apparently the correct answer is E, but I'm not particularly able to pin down the argument structure or understand what it is trying to say and why it is flawed in the respect indicated by the correct answer choice.

Thanks!!

Accounts Playable

Essentially, there are two arguments, and then an analysis of their relationship to each other.

Argument 1:
1.) The role of the supreme court is to protect human rights against government power.
2.) The constitution doesn't talk about all human rights.
Therefore, the supreme court has to use stuff in addition to the constitution.

[This argument seems pretty good to me].

Argument 2:
1.) If the supreme court isn't bound by the constitution, who ever is in power can essentially define what is a human right [this is a problem given the first argument]
Therefore, only the constitution can justify a court decision.

[Again, I think this argument is reasonable enough].

Then, the passage analyzes the two arguments together by pointing out that both conclusions are inconsistent, which they seem to be.

The final conclusion is that premise 1 in argument 1 is false.

What I'm looking for: The overall final conclusion is completely unsupported: why is that first premise in the first argument wrong? Why not a premise in the other argument? The author arbitrary concluded some random thing here. I think the difficulty in this question is that it's hard to say what the conclusion should be here because we really aren't given any context about the author's viewpoint. I guess the author favors argument 2? It isn't that clear.

Answer A: No. What data does the argument ignore? What single example?

Answer B: No. There is no appeal to the majority.

Answer C: No. There is no apparent conflict of interest anywhere.

Answer No. There is no part to whole flaw.

Answer E: Yes. The argument does conclude that a particular premise is false (namely, the first one in argument one), but it could be the case that a premise somewhere else is false. Our argument doesn't adequately attack any premise, let alone let us conclude one premise is better than others.

ChiTownGuy

Thanks!!

moonstars5678

Hi @"Accounts Playable" - thank you for the breakdown! I had a question as to how you identified that first sentence "The role of the supreme court is to protect human rights against government power" as the P1 of the first argument, rather than just part of the context.

I did the breakdown of argument 1 and 2, but I thought argument 1 was just:
P1: Since the Constitution is not explicit about all human rights,
C: The supreme court sometimes has to use something else besides the constitution to justify its decisions.

Naturally, since I didn't ID the first sentence as the premise and instead the context, answer choice E meant absolutely no sense to me (even though the other ACs were clearly not descriptively accurate for this flaw question).

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