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
You explained in your own example why it’s a bad argument. Context is very important when it comes to predicting human behavior and slippery slopes don’t take context into account.
From your example alone, we actually know that smoking cigarettes is more highly correlated with hard drug use at this point in time than marijuana use, but that wasn’t true in the 60s. It seems to be more about perceived risk than about exposure to legal vs. illegal drugs, just as an example for where the whole slippery slope doesn’t work.
Take another common one:
If we make same sex marriage people legal everyone will want to marry their pets/tractors etc! Except the direction that sex/relationship norms is moving is TOWARDS more consent based relationship (away from child marriage etc) so since tractors and dogs can’t consent….probably not gonna happen.
Logic wants proven cause effect relationships.
Latest Answers