People cannot be morally responsible for things over which

Question

People cannot be morally responsible for things over which they have no control. Therefore, they should not be held morally responsible for any inevitable consequences of such things, either. Determining whether adults have any control over the treatment they are receiving can be difficult. Hence in some cases it can be difficult to know whether adults bear any moral responsibility for the way they are treated. Everyone, however, sometimes acts in ways that are an inevitable consequence of treatment received as an infant and infants clearly cannot control, and so are not morally responsible for, the treatment they receive.

Anyone making the claims above would be logically committed to which one of the following further claims?

(A) An infant should never be held morally responsible for an action that infant has performed.

(B) There are certain commonly performed actions for which no one performing those actions should ever be held morally responsible.

(C) Adults who claim that they have no control over the treatment they are receiving should often be held at least partially responsible for being so treated.

(D) If a given action is within a certain person’s control that person should be held morally.

(E) No adult should be held morally responsible for every action he or she performs.

Divyadisha · Accepted Answer

'E' is the right answer.

If someone is saying that if a person has killed someone, he should go to the jail. This doesn't mean that if a person has not killed someone, he shouldn't go to the jail. He might have done some other crime that require him to be in prison.

'D' is exactly saying the latter statement. We know that 'People cannot be morally responsible for things over which they have no control'. But it doesn't necessarily means that people can be morally responsible for things that are under his/her control. That's why 'D' is not the answer.

Option 'E' mentions that ' No adult should be held morally responsible for EVERY action he or she performs' (because there could be some actions that are not in his/her control, in which case he/she should not be held morally responsible)

Hope I am able to explain the confusion

nusmavrik · Answer

This reasoning is specious, I wonder if I ever use it when I was a kid.
Ok.
P1 : People cannot be morally responsible for things over which they have no control.
P2 : It is difficult to determine whether adults have any control over the way they are treated
P3 : It is also difficult to know whether adults bear any moral responsibility for the treatment they get

So the author just threw the word  "responsible"  out of the window LOL

Result is the most absurd statement. The conclusion - People cannot be morally responsible for inevitable consequences of their actions.

Anyone making the above claim is not going to say anything about kids/infants, responsibility, morals etc. He is going to go even further and make a statement E. E is correct.

Abhishek009 · Answer

Can't believe it I got it correct after reading the stimulus twice .... :lol:

Conclusion of the stimulus is - Premises / Reason for the authors claim is - Treatment received as an infant ( No control over the situation) ==leads to==> Treatment received as an adult. Thus the author mentions that adults too have no control/moral responsibility for their treatment. Hence among the given options only (E) fits in perfectly.

mejia401 · Answer

Ok, I understand that E is indeed a better answer but your reasoning is flawed. The thing is, logical opposites are fair game in CR questions, and they are often used in reading comprehension passages, too. You ought to check your assumptions. Anyhow, Thanks for taking the time to reply. +1 kudo

Kurtosis · Answer

Original Explanation:

(E) One claim in the passage is that everyone will sometimes act in ways that are consequential to the treatment they received while an infant. Since the treatment was beyond that person’s control, so are the consequential acts. Therefore, all adults will sometimes do things (relating to when they were infants) for which they should not be held morally responsible. If everyone can disavow themselves of responsibility of atleast one action, then there is nobody who can be held responsible for all of his actions.

(A) Infants may perform actions that are not the consequence of treatment received. In those cases, the argument is silent as to responsibility.

(B) Similar to (A), this choice discusses the responsibility for actions that aren’t necessarily out of the individual’s control.

(C) The argument doesn’t necessarily support this point, stating that in some cases, determining adult control over treatment received is 
difficult. Since nothing guides us as to when individuals who claim to lack control must take responsibility, this choice can’t be fully resolved.

(D) The argument is limited to discussing responsibility for actions beyond the person’s control. Nothing is said with respect to actions within control.

viksingh15 · Answer

One doubt here, in E you are assuming that statement is talking about actions performed as an infant. But statement says "No adult should be held morally responsible for every action he or she  performs ". So it is not talking about actions performed in past but happening in present time.

sayantanc2k · Answer

The present tense "performs" is alright. The statement E is about the action of the adults in the present, not when they were infants.

The last line of the passage indicates that adults  SOMETIMES acts in ways that are an inevitable consequently of treatment received as an infant and infants clearly cannot control . For those actions (performed in the present), the adults CANNOT be held responsible.

Since SOMETIMES the adults cannot be held responsible for their actions (performed in present but because of the treatment they received in the past), they should not be held morally responsible for EVERY ACTION they perform (option E).

hellosanthosh2k2 · Answer

Hi I don't see flaw in  Divyadisha  's reasoning, as she is pointing out the mistaken negation(if A -> B, then if ~A -> May or may not be B) error that choice D has.

DmitryFarber · Answer

Divyadisha was not mistaken.

If we have a conditional statement (A->B), then we can conclude its contrapositive (-B->-A), but not its simple negation or reversal (-A->-B or B->A), which are logically equivalent to each other. D is a mistaken negation, and not a "logical opposite." Also, we should be careful about falling for the trap of "Okay, that answer is the best, but mine is right, too." The four wrong answers are wrong. They aren't simply less compelling than the correct answer.

AN1728 · Answer

Umm so here is the deal,

A. Is essentially a restatement of the existing claim and hence when the question asks about further claims that the author has committed himself by the way of the aforementioned statement there is no answer in this statement, because the author clearly implicitly has already committed himself to this claim without any need for further inference.

B. This one while it surely makes sense that yes certain commonly performed actions may not be capable of being considered as morally responsible actions because of the fact that it might be a ingrained habit that the adult has gotten from the time they were an infant, may close attention to the fact that in the second last line the war use is "sometimes ", which implies that it is not a habit that is not a morally responsible action but rather maybe occasional acts, are these occasional act a habit ? we don't know and for that reason this answer choice while tempting is not the correct one.

C. There is no support in the passage for adult who claim that they are not to be held responsible for the treatment they reactive, the premise only stabilises that sometimes the treatment we receive is a consequence of the action the at we have performed and hence there might be a question of our own liability in the case of the treatment that we receive, not this statement talks about the liability of the same, but to establish the liability we have to establish that the actions that the person has performed was under his control. but as we come to know from the passage that might not always be the case hence we can not make any blanket statement as to whether actions by those who state that they have no control would actually be only because of the infant stage.

D. Again this is the same as A, this is a negation of the first statement of the premise and hence is a completely agreed upon idea and not an inference that the author would agree upon.

E. this is the right answer because, every action includes the actions that have been committed because of the fact that the person was indoctrinated a certain way when they were an infant and hence as per the author they should not be held morally responsible for the same.

Prakruti_Patil · Answer

Why isn't A correct? isn't it used as supporting statement in the argument already -- so it could follow..

DmitryFarber · Answer

Answer A makes a lot of sense, of course--who wants to hold infants morally responsible for anything? However, A is neither a valid inference nor a restatement of anything the argument said. The argument tells us that infants can't control how they are TREATED, and we can't be held morally responsible for things we do as a basis of how we were treated as infants. The argument never tells us about other kinds of behavior infants engage in. Can infants do things that they *do* have control over, and can we therefore hold them morally responsible? This doesn't seem very likely, but that's not the point. The argument doesn't address the issue, so the author is not "logically committed" to answer choice A.

Prakruti_Patil · Answer

thank you so much, now I'm very clear about the argument.. it just felt so correct in the real world -- I stepped out of the constraints/focus of the argument.. thankyou!

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People cannot be morally responsible for things over which

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