People cannot be morally responsible for things over which they have no control. Therefore, they should not be held m...

shunhe on July 31, 2020

Hi @JessicaR,

Thanks for the question! So let’s start by looking at this pretty lengthy stimulus. People can’t be morally responsible for things they don’t have control over. That means that if someone doesn’t have control over something, they can’t be morally responsible for it. We can diagram this:

~Control —> ~Morally Responsible

And we’re then told that therefore, they shouldn’t be held morally responsible for any inevitable consequences either. So we can amend the above to include this fact:

~Control —> ~Morally Responsible & ~Morally Responsible for consequences

We’re then told that it’s hard to find out whether adults have control over the treatment they’re receiving. So sometimes, it’s hard to tell if adults have moral responsibility. But everyone acts in ways that are an inevitable consequence of treatment received as an infant, and infants can’t control. Which means that people aren’t morally responsible for the treatment they receive then.

Now we’re asked for something that must be true based on this stimulus. This is either going to be something that follows directly from one of the premises, or restates one, or combines them somehow. Let’s take a look at (E), which tells us that no adult should be held morally responsible for every action he/she performs. Well, if it’s true that everyone has some actions they aren’t morally responsible for (because everyone acts in ways that are an inevitable consequence of treatment received as an infant), then it can’t be true that adults should be held morally responsible for every action they perform, since they can’t be held responsible for those actions that come from their infant-treatment! Because of that, (E) must follow from the stimulus, and is the correct answer.

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

guibrasil1993@gmail.com on May 24, 2021

Why is A wrong. Could you walk me through also why the other answer choice are wrong. I found this one really confusing. I get why E is right but not why the other answer choices are wrong.

Emil-Kunkin on August 12 at 08:41PM

A is wrong because the author never tells us that infants are not able to control anything, only that they cannot control how they are treated.

B is not proved, we dont know for sure that there are actions that are common that are never in ones control.

There is just no support for C.

Nor is there for D, the passage never says we should.