Logical reasoning PrepTest 113 · Section 3 · Question 10

Flawed

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Something would be justifiably regretted → Shouldn’t desire that thing

This argument features a mish-mash of language that falls into that philosophical world where having a handle on the abstract meaning of what it’s saying could easily take up a lot of mental bandwidth. Luckily, we don’t need to worry about the meaning - just the logic!

Since this argument has a conditional premise and conclusion, we only need to bridge the gap between those two. They both have the same necessary condition - that you shouldn’t desire something. However, the sufficient conditions aren’t the same, so we’ll need to link the ideas found there - something being justifiably regretted, and forgone pleasures.

However, since direction matters for conditionals, the answers are likely to include the reversal of the correct answer, so we need to find an answer that has the right directionality to it. Since we’re trying to get something that justified the conclusion, we want to make sure that the terms show up in the right places to match that. Here, that means we want Forgone pleasures as a sufficient condition, so we are looking for (including the contrapositive):

Forgone pleasure → Something would be justifiably regretted

~Something would be justifiably regretted → ~Forgone pleasure

To see why this direction, consider the argument with it in place:

Forgone pleasure → Something would be justifiably regretted

Something would be justifiably regretted → Shouldn’t desire that thing

Also note that the conclusion isn’t really a conditional, as it talks about only “many” forgone pleasures. However, structuring our approach this way lets us find the connection we’re looking for. And noting that the conclusion is a many statement lets us pick an answer that gives us that connection but matches this logical force.