QUESTION TYPE: Principle – Parallel
PRINCIPLES:
- Morally right to reveal —> Legal obligation to reveal AND harm to self
- Legal obligation to reveal OR harm to self —> Morally right to reveal
- Promised not to reveal AND harm to others —> Morally wrong to reveal
- Morally wrong to reveal —> Promised not to reveal OR harm to others
ANALYSIS: We have two principles we can apply + their contrapositives. With conditional statements, you can only prove the necessary condition. So, if I say “All cats have tails”, knowing something is a cat lets us prove it has a tail. But nothing lets us prove something is a cat.
With that in mind, the only four things we can prove are the four necessary conditions above. So, you should look at the conclusions in each answer and see if they’re one of the necessary conditions in a statement above. If they aren’t, the answer is impossible and you can discard it.
The answers are in terms of morally right or wrong. In the necessary conditions of statements above, we can only prove “Not morally right” and “morally wrong” (in statements #2 and #3 respectively). Let’s look at each answer in terms of what it concludes:
- Not morally right —> could be correct
- morally right —> could not be correct
- Morally wrong —> could be correct
- Morally right —> could not be correct
- Morally right —> could not be correct
So only 2 out of 5 answers were even possibly right. You don’t have to read anything but the conclusion for B, D and E. Because the conclusion is something we can never prove, those answers can’t be right.
On this type of question it is a supreme waste of time to read the whole answer. Start from the conclusion and see if it matches what we’re logically able to prove.
Note that the opposite of “right to reveal” isn’t necessarily wrong to reveal. All we can say it is it NOT “right to reveal”. It might simply be morally neutral to reveal.
___________
- CORRECT. See principle #2 above. “No legal obligation to reveal” is on the sufficient side, and “not morally right to reveal is on the necessary side”. That proves this answer right.
- Look at the conclusion first. The conclusion here is “right to reveal”. To conclude that, one of the statements above must have “right to reveal” as the necessary condition.
None do, so this answer cannot be right. Morally right to reveal is only a sufficient condition, which means we can never prove it. - This answer was a good contender. The conclusion is “morally wrong to reveal”. That’s the conclusion of statement #3, so this answer could possibly have been correct.
So let’s look at the sufficient condition of statement #3. To prove “morally wrong to reveal” we need a promise not to reveal, and harm to others.
Here, Judy may harm her father by revealing the secret. But, since she made no promise to the doctor, we lack one half of the sufficient condition and can’t prove the conclusion. - Same as B. None of the statements above have “morally right to reveal” as a necessary condition, so we can’t prove this conclusion. We can only prove necessary conditions from the principles, not sufficient conditions.
This answer also doesn’t even state the necessary conditions of the first principle correctly! Phil did have a legal obligation, but the other aspect of the first principle is that Phil won’t harm himself. However, this answer says he placed himself at a real risk of harm by testifying. The harm didn’t happen, but the principle talks about harm in the future, at the time of disclosure. When Phil disclosed, he faced real danger as a result. - Same as B and D. To prove “morally right”, we’d need to have a principle that had “morally right” as a necessary condition. None of the statements do. Further, this answer is talking about the morality of hiding information. Whereas the principles were about the morality of exposing information. Super different.
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