Activities that pose risks to life are acceptable if and only if each person who bears the risks either gains some ne...

Irina on November 23, 2019

@CHLee,

Let's start by looking at the argument in the stimulus.

Activities that pose risks to life are acceptable if and only if each person who bears the risks either gains some net benefit that cannot be had without such risks or bears the risks voluntarily.

"If and only if" indicates a biconditional relationship, thus we can infer that:

risky activity acceptable <-> gain net benefit or voluntary risk

(C) accurately applies the above principle since a motorcyclist rides without a helmet voluntarily, we can conclude that the risk to life is acceptable:

voluntary risk -> activity/risk acceptable

I see how saying that risk is acceptable instead of an activity could be confusing, but it appears that (C) uses activity/ risks interchangeably as do the rest of the answer choices, in fact, even (A) states [this] is acceptable, which may refer to the associated risk or the decision.

(A) is incorrect because it describes a lack of action rather than an activity - the source of risk is the salesperson's failure to act. Since the conditional principle only determines when the action is acceptable rather than the failure to act, we can conclude that the principle is inapplicable to this scenario. (A) also could be eliminated based on the reasoning that it is not necessarily posing risk to life as you have pointed out - even without the new safety features, we cannot say that his current vehicle is inherently unsafe.

Let me know if this makes sense and if you have any other questions.