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
Any time you encounter an argument that seems to look like an informal fallacy it should give you pause. But a common mistake people make with informal fallacies is that once they seem to perceive one, they don’t inquire further. Knowing a type of fallacy exists acts as a warning that a person may be engaging in fallacious reasoning, but if they can explain themselves sufficiently then it may not be.
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.
A slippery slope is not a logical fallacy if it is an argument in itself. You need to back it up with logic and evidence otherwise it’s a fallacy and not an argument.
The argument/valid use of slippery slope would be “this is a slippery slope because…”. The fallacy/invalid use would be “you can’t do that because it’s a slippery slope” without providing a valid reason why other than that it’s a “slippery slope”.
Slippery slopes are real and happen all the time, and are probably one of the biggest reasons people debate in the first place (such as debating about political ideologies leading to worse and worse things – which they often do).
A slippery slope argument is not the same thing as an argument which says that one choice or behaviour will lead to other behaviours. People do confuse them a bunch though.
The slippery slope fallacy is typified by having an antecedent and a consequent that do not have a causal link. So for example, the argument “If you smoke weed then things will snowball and you will be doing crack soon”. The arguer has not defined any link between the idea that smoking weed will make you smoke crack. They are just kind of implying that one thing leads to another without offering any evidence. This is a slippery slope argument and fallacious.
Now take the argument you made: “If you smoke weed in a place that it is illegal then you increase the risk of being exposed to harder drugs when acquiring the weed. Person’s who are exposed to harder drugs are more likely to use them. Therefore smoking weed if it is illegal can make you more likely to be a user of harder drugs.”. So now the arguer has defined a causal link between the two behaviours, so it does not have the typical problems of a slippery slope argument (There are still some issues though).
You can’t base an argument on the worst possible outcome that you can imagine.
>Slippery slope: I you have a baby, that baby could grow up to be the next Hitler, and then that baby starts World War Four, and then that war destroys the whole human race. Ergo, we have to murder your baby.
Is any of that a proven outcome? No. There is no evidence to support any of the escalating threats in the hypothetical scenario.
If you have **proof** of a negative outcome (say you have proof that a certain percentage of marijuana users become IV drug users) then it’s supported by evidence you can cite, and is no longer a fearmongering slippery slope
It’s not a fallacy, I think people are usually just disagreeing about how slippery a slope is.
Let’s take the metaphor literally. You’re on top of a mountain, and there’s a slippery slope off a cliff. Is it reasonable to step into it? No.
If it’s a bunch of solid steps down to the cliff, is it ok to go down a few and get yourself out of the wind? Yep.
The idea that actions have consequences isn’t controversial and is not a fallacy. The question is what are the consequences, and are undesirable consequences easily reversed or prevented in other ways. I.e. how slippery, or inevitable, are the consequences. The fallacy that you’re talking about is probably just disagreement about slipperiness.
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.
**”..but since weed is illegal in a lot of places, it could expose you to hard drugs and you could become a user.”**
FINALLY. I have been saying this for years, only to get mercilessly heckled by pot smokers who believe there’s no way weed can be a gateway drug. This is exactly what happened to me and how I went down the road to meth.
FYI: I am pro-weed and think it should be legalized everywhere.
“A” slippery slope argument could be invalid, or it could be valid. You can’t say “the” slippery slope argument because it’s not some unitized concept.
Folks who are against particular slippery slope arguments often can’t perceive or don’t want to admit follow-on affects that could occur. One could say that an extreme example is “[For Want of A Nail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail).”
I’d say that the Overton Window is the cousin to the slippery slope, and far fewer folks dispute the premise of the Overton Window, so there’s gotta be some cognitive dissonance going on at some point.
It’s considered a fallacy when the links are not logically explained. Lots of times, it is used to make something seem worse than it is by saying it will lead to something bad. So A is not that bad but D is really bad. We should not do A because of D. The implication is made that A will definitely lead to D.
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