Logical reasoning PrepTest 113 · Section 4 · Question 15

Flawed

Strengthen with Necessary Premise Questions

Threat of harsh punishment usually causes someone to feel less guilty

Feeling less guilt tends to cause someone to be more likely to do that thing

Conclusion - Threatening harsher punishment could cause people to more frequently ignore the welfare of others

There are two things that we can focus on here when approaching the argument to help us identify the assumption being made.

The first is that this has premises that chain together. They’re not conditional (“usually”, “tendency”), but they are causal, talking about certain things decreasing or reducing other things. We can chain causal ideas together, so the premises let us say:

Harsh punishment usually causes people to feel less guilty, which usually causes them to be more likely to commit a transgression

This is where the second thing we can focus on comes into play - Strengthen with Necessary Premise questions frequently have new concepts that show up in the conclusion that need to be attached to something in the premises. Here, the conclusion talks about increasing the severity of legal punishments for transgressions - in other words, threatening harsher punishment. While that’s a relative term, causal statements are potentially relative, with more of the cause generally leading to more of the effect, so there’s no gap here. However, the other concept raised in the conclusion is people’s tendency to ignore the welfare of others. The premises don’t discuss that, just transgressions.

Therefore, the argument is assuming that transgressions ignore the welfare of others. And since the conclusion is very weak (“may amplify”), we should find a similarly weak answer, as Strengthen with Necessary Assumption questions will rarely have a correct answer that’s stronger than the conclusion.