LSAT 143 | Section 3 | Logical Reasoning: Q3

LR Question 3 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Louise McBride, a homeowner, filed a complaint against…

QUESTION TYPE: Principle – Justify

CONCLUSION: It would be unfair to dismiss Louise’s McBride’s complaint.

REASONING: McBride’s complaint was filed on the wrong form. But a government employee incorrectly provided McBride with that form.

ANALYSIS: Principle-justify questions depend on your ability to separate fact from moral principles.

You might have thought “This is a good argument. That poor woman shouldn’t fail just because a government employee made a mistake”.

To strengthen the argument, you just need to state that principle explicitly: “Complaints shouldn’t be denied on a technicality if the error was due to a government employee’s actions.”

Or something like that. Making the moral principle explicit is what lets you connect the facts in the evidence to the moral judgement in the conclusion.

___________

1. This doesn’t help us. We want to prove that the complaint shouldn’t be dismissed even though the wrong form was used.
2. The issue wasn’t that the form was hard to complete. The issue was that the bureaucrat gave Louise the wrong form.
3. CORRECT. This matches. Louise’s mistake was due to the government agency’s error. This answer lets us conclude that we shouldn’t reject her complaint on account of that.
4. We don’t know why the employee gave the incorrect form. It might not have been due to complex procedures. Maybe the employee was just tired.
5. The argument supports the complaint. But this answer tells us how to dismiss complaints against business.
   (Adding an extra condition for filing complaints always makes complaints harder, not easier)