2006-09-2-12

mygoalusa

One can never tell whether another person is acting from an ulterior motive; therefore, it is impossible to tell whether someone's action is moral, and so one should evaluate the consequences of an action rather than its morality. Which answer helps justify the reasoning above?

A. Th intention of an action is indispensable for an evaluation of its morality.
E. One cannot know whether someone acted morally in a particular situation unless one knows what consequences than person's action had.

I selected E, but apparently, A is the key. "Intention" and "consequence" are completely different things, why A justifies the statement?

icewarm

One can never tell whether another person is acting from an ulterior
motive; therefore, it is impossible to tell whether someone's action is
moral

= It is impossible to tell whether one's action is moral without knowing his intention.

That's A.

If A is ture, then:
since we can never know a person't intention of his action, (necessary condition cannot be met), we can never judge the morality of his action. Thus, the conclusion of the argument: one should evaluate the consequences of an action, forget about morality since its impossible to know.

icewarm

I guess what threw you off is you were looking for something that justifies the conclusion.

What A justified is the premise.

LR is getting trickier. My general impression.

The whole LSAT is getting harder. Language of LR is getting more convuluted. And I can sense LSAC knows we are studying our ass off on the old tests, so they are making changes. Some new LRs just don't fall in the old patterns that we are used to.

jimhou

题干逻辑结构：

前提：人不能知道行为动机（One can never tell whether another person is acting from an ulterior motive）--> 

中间结论：不能知道其行为是否符合道德标准（ it is impossible to tell whether someone's action is moral）-->

最终结论：应该评价结果而非动机。

A. 动机对于判断行为是否符合道德标准是必要的（Th intention of an action is indispensable for an evaluation of its morality），加强了中间结论。故为正确答案。MOTIVE=INTENTION.

E.除非知道行为结果，否则无法知道是否符合道德标准。等价于：一旦知道是否符合道德标准，就一定知道了其行为结果。（One cannot know whether someone acted morally in a particular situation unless one knows what consequences than person's action had）.这和结论是不相关或者矛盾的。

I selected E, but apparently, A is the key. "Intention" and "consequence" are completely different things, why A justifies the statement?