This has always bothered me, because I can think of instance where bad behaviors can definetly lead to worst behaviors. The classic, if you smoke pot you’ll use harder drugs, is clearly not true in itself. Weed doesn’t cause you to want to do harder drugs, but since weed is illegal in a lot of places, it could expose you to hard drugs and you could become a user. I understand that this is not always the case, but I’d like to better understand why this is considered a fallacy when it could be true sometimes.
In: Culture
In my view it is a valid argument if its used in certain ways but not valid if used in other ways. People commonly use it in the way you described, to criticize something minor because it will lead to something major, when there is no certainty that the major event will occur.
But I often use a slippery slope type argument to expose people’s logical flaws. I believe its valid to say “if you come to this conclusion based on this premise, you must also accept this conclusion based on the same logical framework”. It looks a lot like the ole slippery slope, but it is not.
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