LSAT 23 | Section 3 | Logical Reasoning: Q24

LR Question 24 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: A person’s failure to keep a promise is wrong only if…

QUESTION TYPE: Principle

PRINCIPLE: It’s wrong to not keep a promise only if (necessary conditions):

1. You hurt the one you made the promise to.
2. Other people will lose confidence in your ability to keep promises.

ANALYSIS: We can only conclude breaking a promise is “not wrong”. Why?

Because we have necessary conditions for saying it’s wrong to break a promise. To call something wrong, we need a sufficient condition. If either necessary conditions are missing, we can say it wasn’t wrong to break a promise.

So we can say, breaking a promise is not wrong if:

1. The person wasn’t hurt, OR
2. Nobody who finds out will lose confidence in you.

___________

1. We don’t know anything about when it’s wrong to keep a promise. We only have evidence about breaking a promise.
2. We can never conclude that breaking a promise is wrong. That’s especially true here, since the corporation wasn’t harmed, which is the first necessary condition for breaking a promise to be wrong.
3. This situation has one of the necessary condition for saying it was wrong to break a promise. But we’re missing the other necessary condition. Even then we wouldn’t know if was wrong of course: there might be other necessary conditions.
4. CORRECT. This fails both necessary conditions. Miriam wasn’t hurt, and no one lost confidence, so we can say Carlos was not wrong to break his promise.
5. I’ll say it again: we only have necessary conditions. We can never say that breaking a promise was wrong. We need sufficient conditions to do that. And we’re even missing a necessary condition: we have no evidence anyone was hurt.

Recap: The question begins with “A person’s failure to keep a promise is wrong only if”. It is a Principle question. Learn more about LSAT Principle questions in our guide to LSAT Logical Reasoning question types.