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Course: LSAT > Unit 1

Lesson 10: Reading Comprehension - Worked Examples

Inferences about views | Law passage | Cosmic Justice

Watch a demonstration of one way to approach an "inference about views" question about a LSAT reading comprehension law passage. Created by Dave Travis.

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Video transcript

- [Narrator] Which one of the following is a view advanced by the author of passage A, with which the author of passage B would be most likely to agree? Okay, so the answer here is going to be something that Thomas Sowell would agree with. And because passage A was about articulating a part of Sowell's point of view on cosmic justice, it should be pretty easy to pick out. But let's see what we have here. A, it is sometimes possible for the legal system to take unmerited disadvantages into account in rendering judgment on people and their actions. That sounds pretty good. Sowell was saying, yes there are those in the legal system that attempt to implement this kind of cosmic justice. So A sounds pretty good, let's see what B has to say. Whether or not cosmic justice is an attainable ideal, human law should strive for it, because doing so produces more just legal outcomes. No, Sowell is against cosmic justice, so B is out. C, impartial legal processes are a better means of achieving cosmic justice than are efforts to address unmerited disadvantages directly. So that's interesting, there are parts of this that are right. He definitely would say that impartial legal processes are a great means of rendering justice, but he does not want to achieve cosmic justice, or he doesn't believe it's achievable. And if people try to use cosmic justice, it runs the risk of the law not providing sufficient deterrents for people to murder each other. So, Sowell would not agree with that. D, human law should be concerned with the consequences of human actions, not with the myriad of factors that influence human actions. Okay so D looks pretty promising also, because he was talking about consequences. That's the outputs the passage A was talking about. And Sowell is also against using a myriad of factors to influence human actions. And our law should not concern itself with that. So D is looking good too. It looks like we're narrowing it down, we're gonna have a couple to look at in a second. E, human legal systems can in theory achieve cosmic justice by focusing upon factors that tend to mitigate punishment. No, Sowell is basically arguing against cosmic justice, how we should not be attempting to achieve cosmic justice. E is wrong. So we're now just having to consider A and D. And when you look more closely at A, there definitely are reasons why A is wrong. It is sometimes possible for the legal system to take unmerited disadvantages. So these unmerited disadvantages mentioned in passage B are these inputs that the author of passage A is saying we should not be considering. So it's not possible for us to take there is unmerited disadvantages into account, because it's just not fair. Passage A goes further to say, look, we shouldn't even try to implement cosmic justice because we can not know all these inputs and so we should not even try to take unmerited disadvantages into account. So A is wrong, and D is definitely our answer.