LSAT 159 | Section 1 | Logical Reasoning: Q22

LR Question 22 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Some moral virtues, such as honesty, tend to benefit …

QUESTION TYPE: Must Be True

FACTS:

1. Some virtues, like honesty, benefit those who have them.
2. Some virtues, like generosity, don’t benefit those who have them.
3. A characteristic is not a virtue if it tends to harm others.

ANALYSIS: On must-be-true questions with conditionals and quantity words start with a conditional. If you take the contrapositive you get this:

Virtue ➞ not harm others

We also know that honesty and generosity are virtues. So both must be traits that do not tend to harm others. Otherwise, they’d be breaking the rule and would not count as a virtue.

Two of the trap answers relate to the idea of polar vs. logical opposites. The opposite of good is not bad – it is “not good”, or neutral. Just like the opposite of hot is not freezing cold, but instead not hot, or warm, lukewarm, etc. The LSAT expects you to disagree with an idea in the slightest way possible.

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1. We don’t know what happens if a trait is not a virtue. The last sentence says if something harms others, then that trait is not a virtue. So this has a sufficient/necessary error.
    
   However, there’s another issue. The question is about moral virtues themselves, such as being honest. But this answer is about lacking moral virtue, such as being a bad person. These sound similar but they are different things.
2. CORRECT. Honesty is given as a moral virtue, and all moral virtues tend not to be detrimental to others.
3. The stimulus never compares amounts of benefits.
    
   In general, answers which say things like “friends are better than food” or “honesty is better than generosity” are almost never right, because normally we simply don’t and can’t rank those things.
4. We know generosity doesn’t benefit you, but we don’t know that it harms you. It could just be neutral.
5. This is treating “tend not to harm others” (in the contrapositive) as “benefit others”. But those are not the same thing. Just because something doesn’t harm someone else, doesn’t mean it necessarily benefits them.
    
   For example, if the president eats breakfast, that doesn’t harm you, but it also doesn’t help you. It’s entirely unrelated to you.