#15 - Letter to the editor: You say that if the government

[Beatrice Brown]

Hi Menken and Schlueter! Thanks so much for your great questions, which are related

Menken — you're correct that answer choice (D) is wrong because of what's in the sufficient vs. necessary conditions. The author of the stimulus concludes that confiscating a portion of burglars' wages is justified even if it is stealing. However, in answer choice (D), "justified" is in the sufficient condition. To make a conclusion about the practice being justified, we need a principle that has "justified" in the necessary condition. (Alternatively, a correct answer could have had "not justified" in the sufficient condition since, via the contrapositive, "justified" would be in the necessary condition).

Schlueter — building off of what I said above, the issue is that "justified" is in the sufficient condition. Even if the necessary condition in answer choice (D) is met, we cannot conclude anything about the sufficient condition. And what we want to conclude in the stimulus is what is in the sufficient condition: that the action is justified. With conditional statements, we can only make the following conclusions: if the sufficient condition is met, we can conclude that the necessary condition holds; or if the necessary condition is NOT met, we can conclude that the sufficient condition does NOT hold. We can never make a conclusion about the sufficient condition in a conditional statement. As such, answer choice (D) cannot be correct, since the necessary condition being met does not tell us whether the action is justified.

I hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any other questions!

[ArizonaRobin]

I just wanted to make some notes about what I learned working on this question in hopes that they help someone else.

First, for answer choices A and B you can eliminate them simply because they reference the money going to the "burglar's victims" and "the same individuals they victimized." The stimulus discusses funding an account to compensate burglary victims. This means that the money may go to another burglary victim or a pool of victims, not the exact victim that the burglar stole from.

As a victim of a crime myself, I was compensated by my county's victims fund upon conviction of the criminal. He is required to pay fines into that fund as part of his sentencing, but since I've already been compensated his funds will go to help a future victim. Also, he has to repay what the fund paid me so, once again, they money he pays in will benefit a future victim.

The discussion by PowerScore staff above did a great job of clarifying why D was wrong. However, I wanted to add that this question tripped me up because I was thinking of it as a Principle question. It is actually a Strengthen question so the correct answer choice doesn't have to justify the conclusion like a principle question requires. It just has to make the argument a little stronger. Under timed conditions I did not select C because it was too general. However, for a strengthen question, general is okay.

[Robert Carroll]

ArizonaRobin,

This is a Principle question - Principle is not a separate question type, but a concept that can be associated with any of the question types. There are Principle Strengthen questions, Principle Justify questions, Principle Must Be True questions, and so on - in theory, any question type can have a Principle involved. So, while this is a Strengthen question, it's also correct to describe it as a Principle type - that's not unique to Justify questions.

Additionally, if this had been a Justify, the answer should have strengthened even more, so there would be no basis for selecting any of the other answers if this were a Justify anyway.

Robert Carroll