PrepTest 148, Section 1, Question 13
If the purpose of laws is to contribute(51 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the argument(6 more words not shown)
- Atakes a sufficient(13 more words not shown)
- Binfers a causal(8 more words not shown)
- Ctrades on the(18 more words not shown)
- Ddraws a conclusion(16 more words not shown)
- Einfers that because(16 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Happiness could give us a standard for judging laws. If making people happier is the goal, we can ask whether a law advances it. But why would losing that particular goal leave us unable to judge laws at all?
What we’re looking for
We could evaluate laws by whether they protect property rights, promote equality, or help society function. A law could succeed or fail at any of those goals. The author has identified one possible basis for evaluation and then treated it as the only possible basis. That's the flaw I'd predict. We don't have to decide which goal laws actually should serve. Other possible standards are enough to challenge the claim that, without the happiness standard, laws can gain legitimacy merely by already being laws.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
The happiness purpose is presented as enough to provide a basis for evaluation. The argument then treats that purpose as required for having any such basis. That is why it concludes there can be no evaluation without it. But another goal—such as protecting rights—could also give us a standard, so the absence of this one basis doesn't establish the absence of every basis.
- B
The argument doesn't present two observed trends and infer that one caused the other. It states a conditional relationship between a purpose and the ability to evaluate laws, then wrongly excludes alternative purposes. A correlation-based causal inference isn't the move being made.
- C
The problem doesn't depend on a word changing its meaning. 'Happiness,' for example, can mean the same thing throughout, and the argument still makes its unsupported jump. The change is from having one way to evaluate laws to supposedly having no other way, not from one definition of a term to another.
- D
The opening says what follows if happiness is the purpose of laws. It doesn't first establish that happiness ought to be their purpose and then conclude that it actually is. The argument's error concerns the availability of other standards for evaluation, not treating an ideal as a description of the real world.
- E
No property of a whole collection is being assigned to each individual member. The author isn't saying, for example, that because a legal system is fair overall, every law in it must be fair. The reasoning instead wrongly makes one proposed purpose indispensable to judging laws at all.
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