In order to expand its mailing lists for e–mail advertising, the Outdoor Sports Company has been offering its custome...

Mehran on November 28, 2017

Hi @sharpen7, thanks for your post. This is a Principle question, and there is an argument in the stimulus, as follows:

P: To expand its e-mail mailing list, Outdoor Sports Co. has been offering customers financial incentives for providing their friends' e-mail addresses.
C: Offering such incentives is an unethical business practice
P: Because it encourages people to exploit their personal relationships for profit, which risks damaging the integrity of those relationships.

We are asked to identify a principle that would strengthen the reasoning in this argument.

Let's start with answer choice (D): "It is unethical to encourage people to engage in behavior that could damage the integrity of their personal relationships."

If this principle were added to the stimulus, it would strengthen the argument, by more explicitly bridging the gap that now exists between the second premise and the given conclusion. For this reason, (D) is the correct answer choice.

Answer choice (A) is incorrect because it's conditional - exploiting personal relationships for profit is unethical *if* in doing so people risk damaging the integrity of those relationships. This does not strengthen the argument in the stimulus, which is not conditional - it says that exploiting personal relationships for profit *does* risk damaging the integrity of those relationships.

Answer choice (C) is also incorrect, this time because of the phrase "to deliberately damage the integrity of its customers' personal relationships in any way." That's not the scenario described in the stimulus, and so this principle is not as helpful in strengthening the given argument as is (D).

Hope this helps! Best of luck.