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 the simplest of terms, it assumes that if you take one step, others will follow because, once you’ve set foot on a slippery slope, there’s nothing to stop you from sliding all the way to the bottom.
However, there is simply no reason you can’t take one step, and then stop, or two steps, then stop, or three steps and then turn around and walk four steps in the other direction, or…or…
You get it.
Gun laws are often shot down on slippery slope arguments – for example, “if you make bump stocks illegal, the next thing you know all guns will be illegal.”
Now, when you look at that with dispassion, you can see that’s a logical leap that makes no sense – you’re not required to pass any other laws just because you passed the one. But, by convincing people that one law will lead to two, three, four, and… and…, until the maximum irrational outcome has been reached, you equate a small step with an overblown and undesirable major outcome. This false equivalency keeps people from taking even small and reasonable actions.
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