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
Not all slippery slopes are invalid arguments they can often be quite valid.
A slippery slope is when you start from a true assertion, claim that implies a similar assertion must be true, which implies another assertion is true, on and on, until you are asserting a claim that is quite different than the original.
In the slippery slope fallacy, all you have is the steps, without providing any evidence one will lead to another. Claiming marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to harder drugs and criminal activity might be plausible, but it is not true just because you can draw a line from point A to B. You also have to provide evidence.
An example of a good slippery slope argument (cue the denial trolls) is climate change. We can show greenhouse gases are released to the atmosphere, that those gasses trap infrared radiation, and that increased temperatures correlate with increased greenhosue gases. Each of those assertions is suppered by evidence…they might be wrong, evidence can sometimes support an incorrect conclusion, but it isn’t fallacious to draw the conclusion the earth is warming using this argument.
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