LSAT 122 – Section 1 – Question 22

LSAT 122 - Section 1 - Question 22

June 2006

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT122 S1 Q22
+LR
+Exp
Flaw or descriptive weakening +Flaw
Conditional Reasoning +CondR
Value Judgment +ValJudg
A
20%
159
B
8%
160
C
15%
157
D
44%
167
E
13%
161
157
165
173
 +Hardest 146.495 +SubsectionMedium

J.Y.’s explanation

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If violations of any of a society’s explicit rules routinely go unpunished, then that society’s people will be left without moral guidance. Because people who lack moral guidance will act in many different ways, chaos results. Thus, a society ought never to allow any of its explicit rules to be broken with impunity.

Summarize Argument
The author concludes that a society should never allow any of its explicit rules to be broken without punishment. This is based on the fact that if violation of a society’s explicit rules ROUTINELY go unpunished, the people in society will be left without moral guidance, which ultimately leads chaos.

Identify and Describe Flaw
The author overlooks the possibility that allowing rules to SOMETIMES go unpunished doesn’t necessarily have the negative effects of allowing rules to ROUTINELY go unpunished. Routine non-punishments means regularly letting violations go unpunished. Chaos results if that happens. But chaos might not result if you just left a few violations go unpunished, without letting the nonpunishment become routine.

A
takes for granted that a society will avoid chaos as long as none of its explicit rules are routinely violated with impunity
The author never assumes that avoiding routine nonpunishment is sufficient to avoid chaos completely. There might be other causes that lead to chaos; the author’s simply recommending that we should avoid one thing that we know causes chaos.
B
fails to consider that the violated rules might have been made to prevent problems that would not arise even if the rules were removed
The purpose of the explicit rules is irrelevant, because the argument is based on the impact of routinely letting violations go unpunished. The purpose of the rules has no relationship to the fact that routine nonpunishment leads to chaos.
C
infers, from the claim that the violation of some particular rules will lead to chaos, that the violation of any rule will lead to chaos
The argument does not use a premise about some particular rules to reach a conclusion about any rules. Both the premise and conclusion are about any explicit rules.
D
confuses the routine nonpunishment of violations of a rule with sometimes not punishing violations of the rule
The premise concerns the effects of routine nonpunishment. But the author interprets this as a statement about the effects of sometimes not punishing. This is why the author believes society should not even allow a single instance of nonpunishment.
E
takes for granted that all of a society’s explicit rules result in equally serious consequences when broken
The argument is based on the fact the routine nonpunishment of any explicit rule leads to chaos. But the author is open to the idea that murder might be more serious than theft. What matters is that routine nonpunishment of either leads to chaos.

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LSAT PrepTest 122 Explanations

Section 1 - Logical Reasoning

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Reading Comprehension

Section 4 - Logical Reasoning

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