#23 - When investigators discovered that the director of a local charity

[knn20000]

Can someone help me with the wording on C? what does it mean when they say: "no less responsible for the consequences of that story than anyone else is"? when I read the phrase "no less responsible" I thought it meant people who present false story were less responsible for the story consequences. therefore I mark it wrong as my reasoning was if they were less responsible than that hurts the argument.

[Beatrice Brown]

Hi KNN! Thanks so much for this question. This sort of wording can definitely be tricky!

In this case, "no less responsible" means that someone who presents as factual a story that winds up being untrue without having tried to verify it is at least as responsible for the consequences of the story.

"No less responsible" means the same thing as "at least as responsible as." In other words, someone who is no less responsible can be just as responsible as the other party or more responsible than the other party, but they cannot be less responsible. In general, "no less" means the same thing as "greater than or equal to."

Since this is a Strengthen - Principle (PR) question, we want to find an answer choice that fills in any gaps between the premises and the conclusion.

The structure of this argument is as follows:

Premise 1: investigators realized that the director overemphasized the good done by his charity
Premise 2: the director accepted responsibility for the deception once it was discovered
Premise 3: journalists accepted what was told to them by the director and reported the numbers given
Conclusion: journalists were as responsible for the deception as the director was

The gap here is that we don't know that just accepting what was told to them and reporting the numbers given is grounds for concluding that the journalists were as responsible as the director was. Maybe just accepting what is told to them makes the journalists less responsible. So we need to find an answer choice that bridges this gap and asserts that the journalists actions make them just as responsible as the director.

Answer choice (C) gets at this gap by drawing the connection between the journalists' actions, which consisted of presenting a story factually without trying to verify the facts first, with the blame ascribed to them by the investigators, which is that they are just as responsible for the consequences of the director's actions as the director is.

I hope this helps!