Q16 - Consumer advocate: One advertisement that is deceptiv

[jimmy902o]

had a hard time understanding how E could be correct... can we say with confidence that we know that advertiser is expecting people to draw false conclusions?... seems like a little bit of a stretch to me

[timmydoeslsat]

I agree that there is a little step there.

But look at it in this context:

The advocate says that what these ads are doing is deceptive. The advertiser says that is not so due to it being truthful.

We want to help justify the idea of the practice being called deceptive.

A) This will not help us justify what constitutes deceptive as it already uses the word deceptive! This is attempting to strengthen the position of morally wrong, which is not what the advertiser brings up in his rebuttal.

B) This is bad logic. If should be regarded as deceptive ----> [Insert requirement here]

You will never be able to conclude something is deceptive. You will only be able to conclude something is ~deceptive.

C) This would weaken the consumer's advocate argument, as it would call into question his conclusion of calling the practice deceptive.

D) Terrible answer choice. Nowhere are we given evidence that advertisers are attempting to make true information appear false.

This also does not help us conclude deceptive.

E) At least logically this is a slam dunk answer as it would give us the opportunity to conclude something as deceptive, which none of the other answer choices do.

And it is not too far of a stretch to say that this is what the ad is doing. What purpose would the ad serve by stating gram for gram, the bad food is no different than the good food? You would have to have a grocery cart full of the good food to make up what one bad food contains. So that result could be interpreted as walking away with a false conclusion on the part of the consumer, as they may not know that is the case.

[cnguye15]

Consumers usually try to make sure that they don't consume too much sugar for reasons like too much calories and glucose that can cause diabetes.
However, the advertisement try to prevent them from doing this by comparing the degree of fatness between 1 gram of its chocolate pies and that of fruit and vegetable. Yet, as the advocate points out, what if one tiny piece of their chocolate pie contains as much calories as a whole cart of celery? What consumers care is how much of calories or glucose in each slice of a chocolate pies.
Thus, the advocate's main point is that consumers that do not interpret the advertisement's statement as carefully as LSAT takers would just ignore this and buy the product because they end up concluding that the pies have lower amount of calories or glucose than they really are. This is called deception.

[WaltGrace1983]

It would take many more servings of fruits or vegetables to equate the calories in a chocolate pie to them
→
It is deceptive (morally wrong) to state that there is as much fat per gram of sugar in chocolate pies as there is in fruits or vegetables.

So what is the argument saying? The argument is saying that - although the ad is absolutely true - it is deceptive because it is trying to get its consumers to equate the nutrition of a vegetable or fruit serving to that of a serving of pie.

This could very well be a flaw question with a little bit of a change in wording. The flaw equivalent to this could be something like "Because there is as much fat per gram of sugar in fruit than there is a chocolate pie, they are equally nutritious." The correct answer to that would be something about how it fails to consider that there is a lot more to nutrition than fat per gram. Either way, something to think about...

(A) This is just conclusion redundancy. We already know from the statement that, "our advertisement is deceptive and thus morally wrong," means that "deceptive→morally wrong." This is all that (A) is saying. It is just repeating what we already know.

(B) Statement is deceptive → Person making statement believes it to be false → False belief. There are two big problems with this: (1) It mixes up the conclusion and the premise. In the argument, the statement being deceptive is an intermediate conclusion but a conclusion nonetheless while this answer choice uses deception as the main premise. In addition, (2), we have a big problem with that bolded part in the middle here. We have no idea if the people who make the statements in the ad believe it to be false. It could be that they, and rightly so, believe it to be 100% true! We don't know.

(C) This would actually hurt the argument. The argument is very much so only purporting a "small purporting" of the information. However, this answer choice says that this "should not be regarded as deceptive." Whoa! This takes our premises, agrees with them, but ultimately says that the conclusion does not have to follow from those premises. This would be a GREAT flaw answer choice but it fortunately does not work at all in this case.

(D) Let's unpack this. If the statement deceives hearers into believing that the statement is false it is morally wrong? If the readers know that the ad is wrong is it really that deceptive? Maybe it is just a bad ad. Also, the ad is true. We cannot fight that. Overall though, this answer choice is just too out of scope of what we are doing here.

(E) is right. The ad is definitely expecting people to derive a false conclusion from it and thus, it is deceptive.