June 2004 LSAT Section 3 Question 25

Wealth is not a good thing, for good things cause no harm at all, yet wealth is often harmful to people.Which one of ...

meghelle on March 23, 2022

chose D over A because of “often” in question passage

Like many others, I also chose D over A because I thought that the word “often” that was stated in the question indicated a quantifier, meaning that wealth often (sometimes or most of the time) is harmful. Thus, I ruled out A due to the fact that it did not have any quantifier language, and selected D because I thought it more suited, as it has a similar quantifier to the question. So, why is D wrong over A?

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Emil-Kunkin on March 25, 2022

Hi @Meghelle,

This is indeed a tricky one. Even though we have the "often" in the stimulus, it is not exactly serving as a quantifier, but is telling us that wealth can in fact be harmful.

The initial argument can be summarized as follows:

X is not Y, because Y is never Z, but X is often Z.

This is a valid argument- we are concluding that wealth is not good because good things are never harmful, but wealth is harmful.

D tells us that a dog is not a dachshund because he hunts well, but most dachshunds hunt poorly.

We could summarize as : X is not Y, because X is Z, and most Ys are not Z.

Not only does this not match the initial pattern of reasoning, but this is actually not a valid argument! Just because most dachshunds are bad hunters does not mean that this particular dachshund is a bad hunter. This would be akin to saying that Bryce Harper is not the MVP because most people are bad at baseball, and he is a person.

A could be summarized as

X is Z, and No Zs are Y, thus A is not Y.
While it changes the order slightly, the argument structure is the same as in the stimulus.