Critical Reasoning

Civil libertarian: As electronic surveillance of public places becomes more common
and pervasive, we hear more and more attempted justifications of this practice by
government officials. Surveillance, they explain, keeps the public honest and polite
to one another. Such explanations are obviously self-serving, and so should not be
taken to justify these unwarranted invasions of privacy.
A questionable technique used in the civil libertarians argument is to
(A) attack an argument different from that actually offered by government
officials
(B) presume that members of the public are never dishonest or rude to one
another
(C) insist that modern government practices meet moral standards far higher
than those accepted in the past
(D) attack government officials' motives instead of addressing their arguments
(E) make a generalization based on a sample that there is reason to believe is
biased

Source LSAT

E is the answer???????????

it is D....

DETAILED Reasoning please!

what is answer ... D or E?????

D

suryapal wrote:what is answer ... D or E?????

explain .......

bhumika.k.shah wrote:Civil libertarian: As electronic surveillance of public places becomes more common
and pervasive, we hear more and more attempted justifications of this practice by
government officials. Surveillance, they explain, keeps the public honest and polite
to one another. Such explanations are obviously self-serving, and so should not be
taken to justify these unwarranted invasions of privacy.
A questionable technique used in the civil libertarians argument is to
(A) attack an argument different from that actually offered by government
officials
(B) presume that members of the public are never dishonest or rude to one
another
(C) insist that modern government practices meet moral standards far higher
than those accepted in the past
(D) attack government officials' motives instead of addressing their arguments
(E) make a generalization based on a sample that there is reason to believe is
biased

Source LSAT

Here Civil libertarian is not making a generalization, rather he is attacking or opposing the stmt of Govt official by calling the explaination as self-serving in "Such explanations are obviously self-serving, and so should not be
taken to justify these unwarranted invasions of privacy."
so i think it is D

Ok this is a Method of reasoning type of question . So we need to find the relationship between the arguments presented here .

The argument by government : electronic surveillance of public places keeps the public honest and polite to one another .

Argument by civil libertarian : Such explanations are obviously self-serving, and so should not be taken to justify these unwarranted invasions of privacy.

Obviously by elimination the extra stuff from the stimuli we can clearly see that civil libertarian dose not agree with what the government has to say .

Now keeping this in mind we need to find an answer option that supports our analysis .

(A) attack an argument different from that actually offered by government officials
[This is opposite of what we have analyzed, the civil libertarian attacks the governments argument, eliminate ]
(B) presume that members of the public are never dishonest or rude to one another
[Dose not talk about the argument relationship at all , eliminate]
(C) insist that modern government practices meet moral standards far higher than those accepted in the past
[Dose not talk about the argument relationship at all ,also moral grounds is out of scope here , eliminate]
(D) attack government officials’ motives instead of addressing their arguments
[Correct , matches exactly with our analysis]
(E) make a generalization based on a sample that there is reason to believe is biased
[first the civil libertarian is not making a generalization , second no sample is used by civil libertarian to support his argument, eliminate ]

I will Go with option D in this case.