Therapist: The ability to trust other people is essential to happiness, for without trust there can be no meaningful...

shunhe on April 3, 2020

Hi @Zacfisch,

Thanks for the question! Let’s start from the beginning. We’re told that the ability to trust other people is essential to happiness; in other words, trusting other people is necessary for happiness, or happiness requires trusting other people (the necessary condition). We diagram this:

happiness -> ability to trust other people

The next part of the argument starts with “for,” so we can reasonably guess that this first sentence is going to be the conclusion, since it looks like the following sentences are going to support it. We’re told that without trust, there can be no meaningful emotional connection to another human being. In other words, if there’s no trust, then there’s no meaningful emotional connection to another human being.

~Trust —> ~Meaningful emotional connection to another human being

And then we’re told that without meaningful emotional connections to others, we feel isolated. In other words, if we have no meaningful emotional connections to others, we feel isolated

~Meaningful emotional connection to another human being —> Feel isolated

And so we can combine these two to get:

~Trust —> Meaningful emotional connection to another human being —> Feel isolated

And now we need to get from this chain to the conclusion by filling in a necessary assumption to answer the question. Well, if we take the contrapositive of the conclusion, we get

~Trust —> ~Happiness

And so it seems like we need something to get from

Feel isolated —> ~Happiness

Because then we could conclude

~Trust —> Meaningful emotional connection to another human being —> Feel isolated —> ~ Happiness

And this is link is what (A) gives us, so (A) is the correct answer.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.