Ethicist: Studies have documented the capacity of placebos to reduce pain in patients who believe that they are receiving beneficial drugs. Some doctors say that they administer placebos because medically effective treatment reinforced by the placebo effect sometimes helps patients recover faster than good treatment alone.But administering placebos is nonetheless ethically questionable, for even if a placebo benefits a patient, a doctor might, for example, have prescribed it just to give the patient satisfaction that something was being done.The ethicist's argument depends on which one of the following assumptions?
Answer(s): B
The author comes down squarely on the ethical dubiousness of administering placebos on the grounds that, beneficial or not, the placebo may have been prescribed merely in order to placate the patient. For that evidence to lead to the conclusion, the author must be assuming that the ethics of placebo administration has something to do with the motivation behind prescribing placebos.If [The motivation for administering...] were false, the author could still question the ethics of prescribing placebos, but not on the grounds of a doctor's motives for doing so.
After the United Nations Security Council authorized military intervention by a coalition of armed forces intended to halt civil strife in a certain country, the parliament of one UN member nation passed a resolution condemning its own prime minister for promising to commit military personnel to the action. A parliamentary leader insisted that the overwhelming vote for the resolution did not imply the parliament's opposition to the anticipated intervention; on the contrary, most members of parliament supported the UN plan.Which one of the following, if true, most helps to resolve the apparent discrepancy presented above?
The paradox or "discrepancy" is that a country's parliament was all for the UN decision to send in an international peacekeeping force, yet censured its own prime minister for promising troops to that force. Option [In the parliamentary leader's nation...] resolves the dilemma by implying that it wasn't the promise of troops that irked the parliament, but rather the unconstitutional involvement of the prime minister in that promise. It's not at all paradoxical, in light of [In the parliamentary leader's nation...], for a parliament to say "We're in favor of sending troops, but we not you, prime minister, are supposed to make that judgment."
People who are good at playing the game Drackedary are invariably skilled with their hands. Mary is a very competent watchmaker. Therefore, Mary would make a good Drackedary player.The flawed pattern of reasoning in the argument above is most similar to that in which one of the following?
Answer(s): C
The stimulus conclusion "X would make a good Y" is only paralleled by options [People with long legs make good...] and [All race car drivers have good reflexes...]: the conclusions in [People who write for a living invariably] and [The role of Santa Claus in...] are flat-out assertions of fact, and option [Any good skier can learn to...] is is a vague speculation. Only [All race car drivers have good reflexes...] parallels the structure that we can express algebraically as: All X are Y. A particular individual is Z; therefore, that individual would make a good Y.
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Expert witness: Ten times, and in controlled circumstances, a single drop of the defendant's blood was allowed to fall onto the fabric. And in all ten cases, the stained area was much less than the expected 9.5 cm2. In fact, the stained area was always between 4.5 and 4.8 cm2.1 conclude that a single drop of the defendant's blood stains much less than 9.5 cm2 of the fabric.Which one of the following, if true, most undermines the value of the evidence for the expert witness's conclusion?
The task here is to weaken the conclusion that a single drop of this defendant's blood stains "much less than 9.5 square cm of the fabric." The evidence consists of 10 samples, each of which covered about of that area.But if an 11th sample covered almost the entire 9.5 square cm, as option [In an eleventh test drop of...] points out, then the witness' certainty about a droplet's being sure to stain "much less than 9.5" must be reduced to almost zero.
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