To hold criminals responsible for their crimes
involves a failure to recognize that criminal actions,
like all actions, are ultimately products of the
environment that forged the agent's character. It is
not criminals but people in the law-abiding majority
who by their actions do most to create and maintain
this environment. Therefore, it is law-abiding people
whose actions, and nothing else, make them alone
truly responsible for crime.
The reasoning in the argument is most vulnerable to
criticism on the grounds that
(A) it exploits an ambiguity in the term
"environment" by treating two different
meanings of the word as though they were
equivalent
(B) it fails to distinguish between actions that are
socially acceptable and actions that are socially
unacceptable
(C) the way it distinguishes criminals from crimes
implicitly denies that someone becomes a
criminal solely in virtue of having committed a
crime
(D) its conclusion is a generalization of statistical
evidence drawn from only a small minority of
the population
(E) its conclusion contradicts an implicit principle on
which an earlier part of the argument is based