Two things are true of all immoral actions. First, if they are performed in public, they offend public sensibilities....
bcrossMay 30, 2020
Help understanding why my diagram is wrong
I diagramed my prompt as follows:
IA —> O & G
Not O or not G —> not IA
PP —> O
Not o —> not PP
Could someone explain how you know that the correct way to diagram is with IA and PP as one sufficient and IA as an additional separate sufficient condition? Could you also help me understand why my diagram is wrong, so I hopefully don’t make the same mistake again? Thanks!
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Thanks for the question! So let’s take a look at the stimulus. We know two things about all immoral actions: if they’re performed in public, then they offend public sensibilities. Also, they are accompanied by feelings of guilt.
Now let’s diagram these statements, and I’ll use your abbreviations: IA is immoral actions, O is offend public sensibilities, and G is accompanied by feelings of guilt.
So the first sentence tells us that the following are true of ALL immoral actions. In other words, if something’s an immoral action, then it will have the following properties so
IA —> ???
Now let’s take a look at the next part. If they’re performed in public, they offend public sensibilities. What if they’re performed in private? Well, then they might not offend public sensibilities, since no one sees them! So this part actually has two parts of the conditional: the action both has to be immoral, AND it has to be performed in public for us to logically guarantee that the action offends public sensibilities. And this we diagram as the following:
IA & PP —> O
Your diagram is incorrect because it tells us that if it’s an immoral action, it offends public sensibilities and is accompanied by feelings of guilt. But we don’t know it offends public sensibilities; we only know that when we also know that it’s performed in public.
The next part of your diagram is also wrong because it tells us, in plain English (always remember to translate back and forth), “If an action is performed in public, then it offends public sensibilities.” But there are plenty of actions that don’t do that; for example, drinking at a water fountain doesn’t offend public sensibilities, or eating a cheeseburger. It has to be an IMMORAL action for that to be true, and that’s why the second diagram is wrong. So really, this should be diagrammed the way the explanation diagrams it. You need two different conditional statements, because one of them has two parts in the sufficient condition, and the other doesn’t.
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Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.
