Understanding Principle Questions
The Moral Conclusion
More precisely, understanding a certain type of principle question, the justify-by-principle or strengthen-by-principle question. Before getting to the question strategy, though, there’s a broader point to be made about arguments. One way to think of them is that they can be considered to belong to two types - descriptive and normative. Descriptive arguments, as the name suggests, describe the world. They’re designed to convince you that something is true. Example conclusions might be something like:
Carrots cause cancer.
Jones will win the election.
DaVinci didn’t actually paint the Mona Lisa.
But other types of arguments try to convince you of moral points. For isntance:
One should give 10% of one’s earning to charity.
The chemical company is financial responsible for the Smith family’s medical bills.
It was wrong for Stevens to lie to his boss.
The important thing for you to know is, these are two types of arguments. Descriptive arguments are about what is, and normative arguments are about what ought to be. I’m going to switch to calling the second type of argument the “moral argument.” The moral argument shows up all the time in principle questions. You’ll usually see, as a conclusion, that something was right or wrong, or someone was responsible or not responsible for something, or someone should or shouldn’t do something. And to bring this back to the LSAT… you can’t reach a moral conclusion from merely descriptive premises. The moral conclusion requires a moral premise. You can’t conclude that someone was responsible for something unless you have a premise telling you under what circumstances people are responsible for things.
Principle questions often give students trouble, but it’s also often the case that at some point, something clicks, and then they become fairly easy. You just get the knack for how they work. It’s like a key that you have to jiggle, and once you understand how it works, you can make it work every time. A 3-step process will usually eliminate the wrong answers. Here’s how it works:
Assuming that you have a moral conclusion without a moral premise, then you can dismiss the answer choices that are purely descriptive. You can’t get to a moral conclusion from all descriptive premises.
Then you can eliminate the answers that argue the “wrong way.” If the conclusion is that Jones is responsible for Smith’s injuries, then a premise that tells you under what circumstances someone is not responsible won’t work; it would be an incorrect negation to apply it. You can dismiss answers that argue the wrong way.1
At this point, you’ll usually just have a couple of answer choices left; only one will fit the circumstances of the passage. The others will have the logic correct, and they’ll give you the moral conclusion, but they won’t be relevant, because they won’t apply to the situation being presented.
Here’s an example: PT 59, Section 2, Question 13.
(B) and (D) are descriptive answer choices; there’s no value judgment here, no moral component. The conclusion (the last sentence of the passage) has a “should” in it; the right answer will, too.
(E) argues in the wrong direction; it tells us what psychologists should not do, but the conclusion of the passage is that psychologists should do something.
The right answer has to be (A) or (C); the question is which one applies to either the conclusion of the passage, specifically, or the circumstances of the situation. Also, we should note that this is a question type that tells us to accept the answer choice as true; the passage doesn’t have to justify the answer choice - the answer choice is essentially an additional premise that will justify the passage’s conclusion, like a sufficient assumption question.
The conclusion of the passage is that psychologists should identify nightmare-prone children; (A) doesn’t get us there. The “why” that (A) is giving us doesn’t have anything to do with identifying children prone to nightmares.
(C) works, because the circumstances match. It’s all-encompassing “should do everything they can,” but the passage tells us that the techniques, if taught to children who have nightmares, can reduce the nightmares that are likely to plague those children as adults. So if psychologists should do “everything they can” (again, we assume (C) is true for the sake of analysis), then yes, they should do that.
But watch out for the word “only,” which changes the direction of the conditional argument. For instance, let’s say the sentence is, “An employer is responsible for an employee’s injuries only if the occur during work hours.” At first glance, it seems to be telling you when an employer is responsible, but it’s actually not; “only” introduces a necessary condition - This sentence is telling you that if the injury did NOT occur during work ours, then the employer is NOT responsible. “ONLY” reverses the direction of a conditional statement.