Q21 - Ethicist: It is morally right to reveal

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Principle-Example

Stimulus Breakdown:
No legal obligation OR would harm yourself --> not morally right to reveal secret.
Promised not to tell AND Likely to harm others --> morally wrong to reveal secret.

Answer Anticipation:
The big shortcut here is to initially focus on what each argument is trying to conclude.

If it's trying to conclude "it is not morally right", we need to establish at least one of the triggers in the first rule.
If it's trying to conclude "it is morally wrong", we need to establish both triggers in the second rule.
If it's trying to conclude anything else, it's garbage.

The tendency for these questions is for the correct answer to use the OR rule, since you only have to trigger one of the two conditions.

Correct Answer:
A

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Concluding "not morally right", so we must establish "no legal obligation" or "would harm the revealer". This establishes that K had no legal obligation, so we ARE able to conclude her action wasn't morally right.

(B) Concluding "morally right", so garbage.

(C) Concluding "morally wrong", so we must establish that "Promised not to tell" AND "likely to harm others". We don't establish either. There's nothing about promising, and we only know revealing this secret SOMETIMES leads to harm (not LIKELY harm).

(D) Concluding "morally right", so garbage.

(E) Concluding "morally right", so garbage.

Takeaway/Pattern: Wow, that one can go really quickly if people know and use the Conclusion Shortcut. You can only conclude the right side of these rules, so you should always check the conclusion of each answer before reading the whole thing to see
1. Is it even a possible answer?
2. Which rule should I be referencing?

Students must be able to distinguish between "only if" (right side ideas) and "if" (left side ideas) in initially symbolizing the rules, and they have to know that And/Or flip when we write a contrapositive.

#officialexplanation

[KelliW299]

The first conditional statement is MR—>…. Why’s is written in the contrapostive in the explanation but the second conditional statement isn’t?

[ohthatpatrick]

Sorry for the delayed response.

The way these "Principle-Example" (i.e. apply this Principle) questions work, you want to see the rule or rules they give you as

IF this criterion / criteria is true, THEN you deserve to be labeled with this judgment.



So you're always motivated to put the conditional in the form that would give you CRITERIA on the left, and JUDGY TERM on the right.

For example, if we heard a rule that said, "Police force is not excessive unless it greatly surpasses the force required to subdue a suspect", then we could write that rule as
Excessive force ---> Greatly surpasses what was needed to subdue a suspect
or as
Doesn't greatly surpass what was needed to subdue ---> ~Excessive force


Technically, we could find a correct answer that says
(A) the CRITERIA was true. Therefore, the JUDGMENT is true.
or one that says
(B) The JUDGMENT is true. Therefore, the CRITERIA must have been true.

So either form of the conditional rule could potentially be used to match a given argument.
However, in every single Principle-Example question I've ever seen, the correct answer has always been the form of (A), not (B).

So any time I've given one of these principles, I always want to primarily see it as
CRITERIA ---> JUDGMENT

And in that example I just gave, the "judgy idea" is whether or not to brand something "excessive".

In this Q21, the "judgy idea" is whether or not something is morally right / morally wrong.