The government is being urged to prevent organizations devoted to certain views on human nutrition from advocating a ...

shunhe on July 9, 2020

Hi @DavidW,

Thanks for the question! Well, you’re right in that the government would be silencing the political group, but the way they would be doing so is by stopping them from disseminating (spreading) their opinion.

Let’s look at the stimulus. This argument has an analogy between two things: the government stopping political groups because their policies might hurt some people, and the government stopping nutrition groups because they might promote diets that hurt some people. The argument says that since the first isn’t ok, the second shouldn’t be ok either.

Now we’re asked for a principle that helps to justify this reasoning. And we can now take a look at (D), which tells us that the government shouldn’t silence an opinion just because it could be harmful to spread it. Well, if (D) is true, then the government shouldn’t silence the nutrition groups since the government’s reason for doing so is that the opinion might be harmful when disseminated. So (D) strengthens the argument and is the correct answer.

(E), however, is incorrect because it tells us what individuals should do, but we’re concerned with what the government should do.

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