LR Question 8 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Widespread use of the Internet has led to an…
QUESTION TYPE: Principle – Justify
CONCLUSION: We should educate people about how to use the internet ethically.
REASONING: The impersonal nature of the internet may make people freer to do morally bad things on the internet.
ANALYSIS: The argument doesn’t tell us what ethical education does. So we have no idea why we should do it. The correct answer gives us a reason.
Note: This question is a bit of an exception to principle/justify questions. Usually, the conclusion is in the form of “should”, and the premises are facts. The answer will say “if those facts are true, we should do the conclusion”. Perhaps because people caught on to that trend, this question doesn’t have a “should” gap.
Note that moral responsibility is, in context, the same thing as morally constrained. A term shift is fine, as long as concepts don’t shift.
___________
- CORRECT. The argument said people lack moral responsibility in their internet activities. This answer says ethical education is likely to help fix that.
- This is really, really vague. Formulating ethical guidelines isn’t the same thing as ethical education.
- This hurts the argument! It suggests that ethical education may backfire.
- Adding a necessary condition almost never strengthens an argument. This suggests there’s no way to constrain ethical violations if those violations don’t lead to direct harm, which hurts the conclusion.
- This talks about guilt. The stimulus was about how we can get people to stop doing bad things.
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I have a problem with this answer choice (obviously its correct in the test, but it seems wrong to me). It seems that answer A links the concept of ethical education to morality, but it nevertheless assumes that moral behavior should be the goal of society. Nowhere in the prompt does the argument articulate society’s interest in behaving morally. Though answer b is vague, it establishes a normative position about the interest society has in ethical behavior, which is why it seemed like the more correct choice. Thoughts?
I think it’s a common sense assumption we can make here, because immorality is also explicitly linked to harm, i.e. the stimulus isn’t just saying that we should be moral for morality’s sake, but rather because of the consequences of immorality, which include harm to society.
(B) isn’t quite right because it refers to ethical guidelines, rather than ethical education.