LSAT Question Explanation
PT 105, Section 1, Question 8
Necessary AssumptionArgument structure
Consumers are always obligated to report product defects, and producers are never obligated to.
Producers and consumers are only obligated to act in their own best interests when interacting, and reporting product defects is in consumer's best interest.
Explanation
This is a Necessary Assumption question, so we want to look for a flaw in the argument. In this case, only part of the conclusion is proven. The evidence does tell us that consumers are obligated to report defects, but we don't know whether or not producers are obligated to. It's possible that sometimes it's in a producer's best interest to report defects, in which case they actually would be obligated to.
So the author seems to be assuming that it's never in a producer's best interest to report defects.
Answer choices
This is exactly what we said above. If this weren't true (if it was sometimes in producer's best interest to report defects) then the conclusion would fall apart. So this assumption is required for the argument to hold.
This isn't required because the argument is about what people are obligated to do, not what they're expected to do. Whether this is true or not doesn't do anything to the conclusion.
This again doesn't tell us whether or not producers are obligated to report product defects.
This doesn't tell us about obligation, once again.
This is tricky because it actually does prove the conclusion. However, this is a Necessary Assumption question, not a Sufficient Assumption question. And this answer choice isn't needed, because it's so broad. We don't need the two sides to never share the same interests, just that producers don't have some interest in reporting defects.
If we consider some situations that would violate the assumption here in (E) such as maybe in both producers and consumers best interest to have fun products, or great shopping experiences, or to save the environment, those shared interests are actually fine and don't do anything to our specific conclusion about reporting product defects. So this assumption isn't needed for our conclusion to be justified.