Q24 - Editorialist: Landis, one of this city's top elected o

[christine.defenbaugh]

Question Type:
Sufficient Assumption

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: L is guilty of [violating his official duties], regardless of money source.
Evidence: L spent $10K on office.
Spending $10K that way is immoral when so many in poverty.
Counterarg: Many think L violated official duties if used city funds.

Answer Anticipation:
Term shift here between an action being 'immoral' and being one that 'violates his official duties'. That's a hole that most assuredly needs to be filled to lock in the conclusion, so a sufficient assumption must cover that disconnect at the very least! If all immoral actions are automatically violations of official duties for someone like Landis, that would connect the dots.

Correct answer:
D

Answer choice analysis:
(A) This answer wouldn't guarantee that it's a violation of his official duties. It might make it more likely he used city funds (still not guaranteed though), but it doesn't help lock in the idea that it's a violation regardless of where the money came from.

(B) Premise booster. The premise already accepts that this spending was immoral given the poverty issue. We don't need to bolster that claim. And even if we do, this still doesn't help us get from something being immoral to being a violation of official duties.

(C) This is tempting from a fairness perspective - if he didn't know, should we really hold him accountable? But even if we think we need for L to know about it, his knowledge isn't sufficient to make the leap from 'this is immoral' to 'this is a violation of ethical duties'. (Note: it's actually not necessary either - the argument lays out that the spending is immoral as a blanket statement. It doesn't require that the spending be knowing, intentional, etc.)

(D) Ah, a lovely super strong conditional perfectly linking the term shifted items. If immoral stuff is always a violation of official duties, and we've established that L did an immoral thing, then a conclusion that he violated his official duties is rock solid.

(E) This certainly sounds nice, and if it were true would really underscore that Landis is a big ol' jerk, but it doesn't quite complete the circuit. We'd need this to clarify that doing this jerky, jerky thing would constitute a violation of his official duties. (That we might believe in our hearts that it does is beside the point!)

Takeaway/Pattern:
Without a clean breakdown of the argument, it's easy to get caught up in trying to justify that this action was actually immoral, or that Landis himself can take the blame. We need to ignore the components that have already been accepted in the premises, and focus on the 'new player' that rears up in the conclusion, wholly unsupported - the concept of "violating official duties."

#officialexplanation