Saunders: Everyone at last week's neighborhood association meeting agreed that the row of abandoned and vandalized ho...

Shunhe on July 24, 2020

Hi @jingjingxiao11111@gmail.com,

Thanks for the question! So let’s recap this argument really quickly. We’re told that a bunch of abandoned and vandalized houses on a street posed a threat to the safety of the neighborhood. There were essentially two approaches that could’ve been taken.

The first is what actually happened, which is tearing down and destroying the buildings. And this appears to have worked.

The second was supported by people who thought that tearing them down was unnecessary, since the buildings were basically sound, and the city had a fund to help people who needed housing buy and rehabilitate those buildings. So the second plan was basically to let those people buy and rehabilitate the houses.

But, the author says, the demolition strategy worked, and so this proves that those who favored it were right and those who favored the second solution were wrong. The second solution wouldn’t have worked.

Now something very curious about this reasoning should stand out, which is that Saunders says the second solution wouldn’t have worked, but he doesn’t give any evidence for it, other than that the first solution did work. But this isn’t mutually exclusive with the second solution working; it’s possible that both the solutions would’ve worked. And it’s not like they tried out the second solution; they just destroyed the houses first. So this is a problem with Saunders’s reasoning. And now if we look at (D), we’re told that the reasoning is flawed because it doesn’t offer evidence that the policy that Saunders’s opponents advocated (so solution #2) wouldn’t have worked if they had tried it. That’s exactly what we said above, and so (D) is the correct answer here.

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