Slippery Slope

I'm interested in some details concerning this fallacy. An excerpt from Slippery Slope Fallacy entry:

On the other hand, after acceptance of interracial marriages we now face acceptance of same-sex marriages, so... you see the problems. Does this count as "establish[ing] the chain of logical implications"? After all, both issues stem from the growth of importance of personal freedom against tradition or social order.

Similarly, this argument is used in the abortion debate, but the claim that abortion opens the way to infanticide seems to, actually, find a backing in truth in the form of Peter Singer's bioethics. And here we may say that Singer's view stems from utilitarianism, while a right to abortion does not have to, thus cutting the chain of implications.

Then, we may claim that it is a fallacy in both these cases, assuming that what the fallacy is about, is not really the slide down the slope itself, but that the end result has to be negative.

Opinions?

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

The difference between "interracial marriage -> gay marriage" and "gay marriage -> parakeet marriage" is fairly obvious, namely parakeets are not legal persons and therefore are unable to sign contracts. The same goes for minors, who aren't eligible to enter into legal proceedings except by piggybacking off their parent or guardian, largely.

I think the problem is whether the end point of a slippery slope is good or bad. If you're arguing expansion an expansion of rights with a slippery slope discussion, but the end point of such a slope is even better than where you are currently at, it becomes a silly argument. For instance, "If we allow blacks to vote, tomorrow we might have women voting!", oh noes except that's a better situation than before.

In comparison, if you said "If we allow people to be jailed without warrant or evidence simply on terror related charges, tomorrow they could expand it to other charges", the end point of such a slope is bad.

Valid point that gay marriage won't lead to animal marriage but what about it leading to polygamous/androus/amorous marriages and/or incestuous adult marriage? Not that I have a problem with any of those.

Trump delenda est

The thing is with slippery slope is that it presents only one outcome as the inevitable outcome to one conceived solution. It's basically saying "If you make gay marriage legal, then will most definitely lead to X", X can be a good thing or a bad thing, but the speaker has to make it clear that it's going to lead to X even when there's very little to no connection.

The thing about making witty signature lines is that it first needs to actually be witty.

Where the slippery slope argument is useful is where allowing something contradicts an inviolable, non-subjective principle which is supposedly the reason to disallow something else.

That sentence probably didn't make much sense, so here's an example:

The government is not allowed to arrest and jail you without a warrant because of the principle of Due Process of Law. If the government is allowed to arrest and jail suspected terrorists without a warrant, that violates the principle of Due Process in that instance. If Due Process is therefore not one of our basic inviolable principles, then what prevents the government from arresting and jailing you for other causes, aside from its present whims?

Arguing that the principle "do not arrest people who are not terrorists" would still prevent it is not valid, because whether a person is a terrorist is a subjective judgement.

So the gay marriage -> parakeet marriage argument is not valid because another principle, namely "animals cannot enter contracts", would still prevent that from happening. Gay marriage -> polygamy, on the other hand, might be valid, since in this case the principle "marriage is a sacred insitution between one man and one woman" might be the only principle preventing either one.

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Slopes exists, in many directions, but they're rarely all that steep ones. When pushing an issue, you often settle for some sort of compromise, and if it works out, people might be willing to take it further.

Gay marraige might pave way to polygamy, but I would point out, that it's not just liberal issues that can slide further. On the reverse, places where gay marriage has been blocked by law, it is not unheard of to also see revoked anti-discrimination laws, 'section 28' *

and in extreme cases, bringing back sodomy laws. There's a long way to go from that to pink triangles, but it's not any more farfetched than interspecies of pedophilic marriages.

It's a pity Rottweiler was banned—I recently developed a new hypothesis as to how his moral system works, and if I'm correct, then under his system the slippery slope is not a fallacy. He could have provided some interesting input here.

(To clarify, I think he ranks the elements of his moral code, and follows them in order under all circumstances, never letting a lower-ranked element override a higher-ranked element. It's oddly similar to Asimov's laws of robotics. I furthermore think he thinks everyone else utilizes a similar ranking system, which would explain a lot of confusion between him and others.)

edited 6th May '11 6:50:31 PM by feotakahari

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

Wha-huh?

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

^^The slippery slope isn't a fallacy, though. It's a very real phenomenon. The "slippery slope fallacy" is merely a particularly common form of non sequitur where the arguer assumes that the slippery slope will happen without properly justifying it.

Belief or disbelief rests with you.

@Feo: you're likely right about some part of Rott's thought processes there. Still, I think his inability to join in any discussion without taking it over and making it all about him and his peculiar worldview was a net negative to the site, as was his inability to comprehend any other possibility than his extremely rigid and idiosyncratic set of rules being right.

Now, that latter part is not unique to Rott; someone equally rigid and idiosyncratic whose rules happen to be less right-wing and less authoritarian, and thus less against the grain of the common political consensus here, would have faced fewer problems and gained more sympathy.

A brighter future for a darker age.

Thank you.

Assuming a slippery slope must happen is a fallacy. Safeguarding against it, however, is not only not remotely fallacious, it's wise.

Rottweiler*

subscribes to a teleological philosophy. If I understood him right, this means that he believes that every action or object has some intrinsic purpose. As far as I can tell, the slippery slope argument really isn't fallacious if this is your assumption, since it suggests that whatever it is applied to is not intrinsically useful for that purpose, and is therefore inherently flawed.

In his own words, "I stretch your beliefs to their logical extremes to see if they hold, or if you run away for the comfort of opportunistic inconsistency."

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OK, let me make an amendment to that: Rottweiler was not a net negative to the site overall, but he was frequently a negative in OTC threads, because once he and those who sparred with him got into it, the thread was effectively dead for anyone else from that point onward.

Which suggests that we needed to find a better way to shut off those cyclic, fruitless arguments.

A brighter future for a darker age.

Ah, reading comprehension fail on my part. Sorry about that.

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The slippery slope argument assumes that the only reasonable arguments against outcome B also precludes outcome A. This is true in some cases, but not in most of those that are presented. Generally when someone uses a slippery slope argument against outcome A, outcome B is something pretty much everyone thinks is bad, while outcome A is more questionable. There's generally a reason for that.

For example, I've heard people argue 'if we accept homosexuality, we'll accept pedophilia and bestiality too'. In reality, though, there is a good argument to accept homosexuality but not those other two - sex is fine if both partners can and do freely consent. Children can't consent to sex, animals can't communicate consent in a way a human can be sure of understanding, and both are easily exploited by an adult human. None of those issues apply to gay sex.

On the other hand, one slippery slope argument that I've used myself is 'if we legalize assisted suicide, end-of-life care will become poorer in an attempt to pressure people to kill themselves'. Given how many people are willing to cut costs no matter who suffers, and how many people generally have little sympathy for a person's suffering if they had any choice in the matter, I think that's a very reasonable fear.

edited 10th May '11 8:40:35 AM by Ettina

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