Political theorist: The chief foundations of all governments are the legal system and the police force; and as there ...
@MichaelaJJune 8, 2023
Why not A as answer choice?
My first question is: Would this be a causal flaw? (Correlation as proof of causation)
I understood the question to be that if police officers are not paid well you can't have a good legal system.
Police are not paid well=not good legal system
Police paid well= good legal system
By not paying police officers well, you can't have a good legal system.
I chose A because I thought this would show that there are governments that have bad legal systems and bad police forces and it's not a matter of pay that caused them to have a bad police force.
Let me know if this makes sense. Thank you for your help.
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Hi, I'm not sure if the author is committing a causal error here exactly. They tell us that the core of government are the law and enforcement, and that the law cannot exist without well paid police. This established that well paid police are necessary to a good legal system.
The author then concludes that if the police are indeed paid well, then the legal system will be good.
I don't think the author is actually arguing that one causes the other exactly, although I suspect the author does think that good pay causes a good legal system. However, we generally see causation issues when we are using a correlation to infer causation, and that is not what we have here.
Actually, A wouldn't help to fix a causal flaw. A only points us to a correlation, and an argument wouldn't be flawed because it fails to establish a correlation, it would be flawed since it failed to establish causation.
Here the argument is flawed since the author mistakes sufficient for necessary. The author assumes that since good pay is needed for a good legal system, that if we have good pay we must also have a good legal system. This ignores the possibility that there are many other reasons a legal system would be bad, such as stupid laws or inefficient courts.
@MichaelaJJune 9, 2023
This makes sense a bit. How would you know that the cause is mistaking sufficient and necessary? Would we look for the same terminology as we would for any other LR question and write it out and take the contrapositive?
Emil-KunkinJune 11, 2023
I think it's less about looking for keywords or terms and more about thinking how the authors conclusion might be not true, even if their premises were true. While there is some sufficient and necessary language here like "all," we also see a lot of guarantees here, and that's what conditional logic boils to. Since the conclusion is that paying cops well will guarantee a good legal system, so we should try to find ways that we might be able to pay cops well but still not have a good system, such as one with slow courts or stupid laws.
