PrepTest 23, Section 3, Question 21
Helen: It was wrong of my brother Mark to tell our mother that the reason he had missed her birthday party the evening before was that he had been in a traffic accident and that by the time he was released from the hospital emergency room the party was long over. Saying something that is false can never be other than morally wrong, and there had been no such accident�Mark had simply forgotten all about the party.
Helen: It was wrong of my brother Mark to tell our mother that the reason he had missed her birthday party the evening before was that he had been in a traffic accident and that by the time he was released from the hospital emergency room the party was long over. Saying something that is false can never be other than morally wrong, and there had been no such accident�Mark had simply forgotten all about the party.
Helen: It was wrong of my brother Mark to tell our mother that the reason he had missed her birthday party the evening before was that he had been in a traffic accident and that by the time he was released from the hospital emergency room the party was long over. Saying something that is false can never be other than morally wrong, and there had been no such accident�Mark had simply forgotten all about the party.
Helen: It was wrong of my brother Mark to tell our mother that the reason he had missed her birthday party the evening before was that he had been in a traffic accident and that by the time he was released from the hospital emergency room the party was long over. Saying something that is false can never be other than morally wrong, and there had been no such accident�Mark had simply forgotten all about the party.
The justification Helen offers for her judgment of Mark's behavior is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that the justification
ignores an important moral distinction between saying something that is false and failing to say something that one knows to be true
confuses having identified one cause of a given effect with having eliminated the possibility of there being any other causes of that effect
judges behavior that is outside an individual's control according to moral standards that can properly be applied only to behavior that is within such control
relies on an illegitimate appeal to pity to obscure the fact that the conclusion does not logically follow from the premises advanced
attempts to justify a judgment about a particular case by citing a general principle that stands in far greater need of support than does the particular judgment
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