PrepTest 116, Section 2, Question 9
Activist: As electronic monitoring of employees grows more(44 more words not shown)
A questionable technique used in(5 more words not shown)
- Aattack an argument(8 more words not shown)
- Bpresume that employees(6 more words not shown)
- Cinsist that modern(13 more words not shown)
- Dattack employers' motives(5 more words not shown)
- Emake a generalization(12 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
A policy can benefit the employer and still have a good justification.
Suppose someone works in customer service. I can understand why an employer might want to know whether customers are being treated politely. Monitoring could serve the employer's interests and actually improve the service customers receive. Whether a particular form of monitoring is acceptable is another question, but self-interest alone doesn't settle it.
The activist calls the employers' explanations self-serving, then treats that as a reason to dismiss them. What happened to the claims about honesty, efficiency, and politeness? We haven't been shown that surveillance fails to achieve those benefits, or that the benefits cannot justify its privacy costs. We have only been told that the employers stand to gain.
What we’re looking for
The question asks for the activist's questionable technique. I'd look for the shift from evaluating the reasons offered to attacking the motives of the people offering them. We can be open to an argument against surveillance without accepting this particular dismissal of the employers' case.
Working the answers
- A
The passage gives us no evidence that the activist has replaced the employers' argument with a different one. The activist reports their benefits and rejects the explanation as self-serving. That is an attack on the motives behind the stated argument, not a demonstrated distortion of what the employers argued.
- B
The activist doesn't say employees are always honest, efficient, and polite. Someone could agree that employees sometimes behave badly and still think surveillance is unjustified. The activist's stated reason is that the employers' explanations serve their own interests, not that employees are perfect.
- C
We aren't given a comparison between moral standards now and in the past. Surveillance becoming more common or invasive doesn't establish that the activist demands a higher standard than earlier generations accepted. C describes a historical comparison the reasoning never makes.
- DCorrect
Calling the explanations self-serving attacks the employers' motives. But an employer could gain from surveillance and also correctly identify benefits that count in its favor. To dismiss those reasons, the activist needs to address their substance or show why they don't justify the intrusion. Pointing to self-interest doesn't do that work.
- E
There is no sample-based generalization here. Imagine surveying only exceptionally invasive workplaces and treating their practices as typical of all employers. That could create a problem with the sample. This argument doesn't report such a survey or draw that kind of inference. Suspecting the employers' motives is different from using an unrepresentative sample.
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