Arnold: I was recently denied a seat on an airline flight for which I had a confirmed reservation, because the airlin...

shunhe July 8, 2020

Hi @Eva-Paron,

Thanks for the question! So this one is definitely a confusing one. Let’s start off with what Arnold’s saying. Arnold’s denied a seat on an overbooked flight and misses an important business meeting because he’s forced to fly on the next available flight, and now he wants compensation. But there’s a catch: the flight was cancelled anyway because of bad weather, and so Arnold wouldn’t have made it anyway.

Jamie says that the airline doesn’t have to give him compensation, and we’re trying to justify her response to Arnold via one of the answer choices. So take a look at (C), which tells us that the airline is morally obligated to compensate a passenger who’s been denied a seat on a flight they had a reservation for only if the passenger wouldn’t have been forced to take a later flight had the airline not overbooked the original flight. Remember that only if introduces the necessary condition; in other words, we can diagram this

Morally obligated to compensate passenger with reservation —> ~Passenger would’ve been forced to take later flight had airline not overbooked the original flight

Now let’s see if the necessary condition is true. And we can see that it’s not. Had the airline not overbooked the original flight, Arthur still would’ve been forced to take a later flight, since the flight was cancelled anyway due to bad weather. And since the necessary condition is false, the sufficient condition of being morally obligatory to pay Arnold is false as well. And so (C) helps support Jamie’s response, and is the correct answer.

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