Next he will pick his nose. Then when he gets on the bus, he will put his germs on the handrail. The next moment an inadvertent child's mouth will touch it. And then the child will get sick. Then, his whole family will get sick as well.
There will be an outbreak of disease in the city! The cop could not bear thinking any further, and fired his gun. People who drink more than six alcoholic beverages a day are more likely to have health problems than people who do not drink alcohol. After one drink, people lose their ability to make good decisions and end up drinking more and more until they are drinking more than six drinks each day.
Therefore, all consumption of alcohol should be banned. If Texas adopts a personal income tax, I'm moving away. For example, a slippery slope argument could involve saying that if we allow a relatively minor event to take place now, then a major and tragic event will happen in the near future as a result. Slippery slope arguments are prevalent in many fields. For instance, the following is an example of a slippery slope argument in the context of bioethics :.
Slippery slopes arguments are also frequently used in the legal context. For example:. Slippery slope arguments are also frequently used in politics , and especially by traditionalists , who oppose change and who want to argue against it in the media or in the legislative context.
There are three main types of slippery slopes :. There is significant variation in terms of how different philosophers treat the different types of slippery slopes.
However, in general, there are several characteristics that are shared between the different types and the different descriptions of slippery slope arguments:. A causal slippery slope is an argument that suggests that undertaking an initial action will lead to a chain of events that will culminate in a dramatic outcome. For example, a causal slippery slope could involve arguing that if we help students who struggle by providing them with extra tutoring, then eventually we will simply give perfect grades to all students regardless if they put in any effort or not.
At least two events are necessary for a causal slippery slope, though any a number of events can appear in between them, with each event in the chain occurring directly as a result of the previous one. Accordingly, a causal slippery slope will usually have the following structure in practice:. These slopes often involve a positive-feedback mechanism , where the initial action in question will set off a chain reaction that reinforces itself.
Skip to content Slippery Slope Fallacy. Writing Lab Menu open all close all. Sign in New account. Remember me. Log in. A semantic slippery slope argument could be cogent, but it's also a red flag that there might be something fishy going on under the surface. The old joke: A Baptist minister once warned young people against sex because it leads to dancing. The problem with slippery slope arguments is that they strictly speaking only allow extreme positions, because every move away from one of the extremes is a move towards the other extreme, and if the other extreme is identified as something bad, then the slippery slope argument will say that a slight move towards that extreme is bad because you can add another small move, and another one, and eventually you'll get so close to the other extreme that it is clearly bad.
For example, a slippery slope argument would say that you should always reduce your food intake as much as possible, because if you eat a bit more, the next time you might eat again a little bit more, and again a little bit more, until you eat so much that you get obese.
Of course obesity is a real danger, as the large number of obese people shows. But the principle of eating as little as possible isn't healthy either because it leads to anorexia. In most cases, the optimum is not at one extreme, but somewhere in the middle you should not eat too much, but you also should not eat too little; you should not waste your money, but you also should not be stingy.
Of course if you are somewhere in the middle, there's always the danger of failing to remain there and moving to far to one side. But what the slippery slope argument fails to take into account is that this danger exists for both directions. The problem is that extreme positions are very easy to maintain because it is very easy to tell what's "wrong": Everything which moves away from the extreme.
If you try to keep a healthy middle, things are not so easy: For each single move, it may not be always obvious if you already get too far away into one of the directions, or maybe are even correcting a previous move too far in the other direction.
That is, if you try to maintain a middle position, you always need to think about whether something already goes to far. Moreover, different people will not agree where exactly is the optimal point, and it's not that easy to explain why you consider your point the optimal one, or even what this point is and sometimes you'll even have to adjust your position about what the optimal point is, as you learn something new, or as the situation changes.
A maintainer of an extreme position has it easier. He has a clearly defined position, and every move away from it can be argued against with the slippery slope argument. That's what makes extreme positions and slippery slope arguments so attractive: You don't have to think about whether this specific move is good or bad. You just have to look at the general direction of the move to determine if you should reject it. In the course of debating many political issues, it is very common for both sides to claim that various things will have various effects, without either side being able to definitively prove its case.
Over the years, I have found that in many cases when one side claims that one political action will cause some particular chain of effects and the other is arguing that such a chain of effects will not occur, the latter party in practice ends up deliberately instigating the very chain of events they claimed would not occur.
In formal argument where there is fundamental agreement upon premises, the credibility of one's opponent doesn't matter. In politics, however, when arguments are predicated upon unproven claims, it is necessary to judge the credibility of the participants' claims, and such judgements may often be very reasonably based upon judgments of the participants themselves.
The fact that a person is of bad character would not imply that they are incapable of making a valid argument, but should cause one to regard with extreme suspicion the claims upon which their argument would rest. I make an argument that in a situation A, we should do X. X isn't entirely positive, but in situation A the benefits are hugely outweighing the negatives.
You then say that in situation A' I would also suggest doing X, even though in situation A' the benefits are a tiny bit less. And then you make the "slippery slope" argument that eventually in situation B, which we get by applying tiny changes to A, I would also argue to do X, even though in situation B doing X would be entirely negative. And because of that "slippery slope", we are not supposed to do X in situation A, where it is clearly beneficial.
If the long-term consequences that Mason claimed are that we might in the future do X in inappropriate situations if we do it today in an appropriate situation, that would be the "slippery slope" fallacy.
But in most situations, looking at long-term consequences is nothing like that. Like most informal fallacies, pointing it out is not enough.
Rarely is someone using a slippery slope argument to say "X, so therefore, Y". It's fallacious in this case; where someone is trying to use modus ponens in a literal sense; that is, trying to say that the "slippery consequence" of an antecedent will follow logically.
But most often, it's used to say, "well, if they allow this to happen, then something even more radical will be next". And whether that's a good probabilistic conjecture depends entirely on the subject in question. For example, this is bad:. So you're correct, the fallacy is misused an awful lot. This is the problem with informal fallacies; they're at best rules of thumb.
There are always an examples where they can be decent arguments, and they function as descriptive labels for styles of inference, not the determinatents of whether the argument is good or not. In the gay marraige example, it's not a bad argument because it happens to have the slippery slope form, but because it's unlikely that legalising marrying dogs will result. But suppose there was a powerful movement to legalise dog-marraige, and legalising gay marraige would make society more receptive to the idea.
Then the argument would in fact be good.
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