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Volume 4 Number 15 June
23, 2006 |
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Slippery slopes Why slippery slopes are fallacies and why some
arguments aren't slippery at all After I wrote about logical fallacies last time, my mail indicated that there was a lot of interest in the "slippery slope" fallacy. This is the argument that if we allow A, it will lead to B (which is less acceptable), and that will lead to C (which is even less acceptable), and eventually to Z (which is too horrible to contemplate). The implication is that as we progress "down" the slope from A to Z, there is no logical place to grab on to and stop the progression. Because there was this interest, I figured it might be worthwhile to further investigate slippery slope to see how it works, or rather doesn't, and at the same time to explain how some arguments are misidentified as slippery slope, when they are really something else. I've classified the slippery-slope arguments into several categories. The categories and the labels are mine, so take that for what it's worth. The first group is what I call "Nonsensical." The most recent example of this fallacy has been made famous by Senator Rick Santorum, among others, that allowing same-sex marriage will lead to people wanting to marry their pets or barnyard animals. I can't speak for Senator Santorum's personal fantasies surrounding animals, but by no stretch of any sane person's imagination is there any logical or unimpeded progression from marrying a consenting adult person, of whatever sex, to marrying a creature of another species. If Senator Santorum thinks so, our biggest worry is not about someone marrying their St, Bernard, but rather having people who think like Santorum writing our laws. Usually, however, these sorts of mythical slippery slopes with nonsensical conclusions are nothing more than cheap rhetorical charades meant to scare the unwary. Unfortunately, they work more often than they should. Another group of slippery slope arguments are ones that I have classified as "Absurd." These usually start out with something either true or at least plausible, but, by the end of the slope devolve into the absurd. The best example I can think of comes from my high-school days. I went to a school run by nuns. It wasn't a hoity-toity place, but rather an inner-city school that catered to the children of mill workers and immigrants. As someone remarked at one of our reunions some years later, "Holy Mackerel. We lived in a ghetto and we didn't even know it." At any rate, the nuns required us -- the boys, that is -- to wear sport coats and ties to class every day. The girls wore those lovely uniforms common to '50s-era Catholic schools and women's correctional facilities. The boys wanted something more casual -- maybe losing the jacket and stepping down to just shirt and tie. The nuns, of course, objected and their argument went something like this. If they let us stop wearing jackets, then next we would want to stop wearing ties. If they let us do that, then we'd want to wear short-sleeve shirts. If they allowed that, we'd want to wear T-shirts. And next, we'd want to come to school in our underwear, although I'm not sure the nuns drew a clear distinction between T-shirts and underwear. This argument suffers from two major flaws. While the nuns' feared progression is valid to a point, it wanders into the absurd when it gets to the part about us wanting to brave New England winters in nothing but our underoos. More important, it was an unnecessary argument. There were plenty of reasons for them not to want to relax the dress code. Reverting to the slippery slope -- and especially an absurd one -- just wasn't the best argument. It weakened their case, rather than strengthened it. Another version of slippery slope comes when people mistake social evolution or evolution of thought for a slippery slope. These I call "Mistaken." The best example of this comes with the arguments against doing away with segregation. Years ago, segregationists argued that if we allowed blacks to drink out of the same drinking fountains as whites, the next thing you know they'd want to be using the same waiting rooms. Then, they'd want to live in your neighborhood. If you allowed that, the segregationists argued, the blacks would want to go to the same schools as whites. Then, black kids and white kids would start dating. And then, "horror of horrors," they'd start getting married and having bi-racial kids. And you know something, they were right -- except for the "horror of horrors" part. All of these things have happened. What we've found, though, is that it wasn't so much of a slippery slope as a natural progressive evolution of thought and attitudes. The "Z" of interracial marriage wasn't something "too horrible to contemplate," and we've pretty much just accepted it as the way things are, although I'll grant there are a few knuckle-draggers who still maintain their opposition, along with other unsupportable "white supremacist" beliefs. So, the segregationists were correct at least in their construction of the likely progression of events. Where their slippery slope failed was in their inability to demonstrate a priori how the "Z" of interracial marriage was a bad thing. That was merely an attitude they held -- and, like most attitudes, it changed over time. So, they mistook progress for a slippery slope. Other times, people will create a slope out of things that aren't really a progression, natural or not. They just go out and grab other ideas that seem unacceptable and try to show how A will lead to 4. I used "4" because it's a real thing, but not part of a progression that flows naturally from "A." These slippery slopes I refer to as "Fabricated." The best recent example comes again in the arguments against same-sex marriage, in which the opponents tell us that allowing same-sex marriage will only mean that people will want to enter polygamous unions. News flash: Polygamy has been around a lot longer than same-sex marriage. In fact, polygamy has been around a lot longer than monogamy. In further fact, when you look at the scope of human history, polygamy has been the norm. So, the idea that same-sex marriage will lead to polygamy just doesn't make any sense. It's a fabricated progression, created to scare people with the so-called specter of polygamy as a way to oppose same-sex marriage. Now, the push for same-sex marriage may encourage polygamists to become more vocal, but that's only because the discussion around same-sex marriage has forced us to re-examine the current concept of marriage. However, the proponents of polygamy have always been there. They weren't created by the current discussion. As a point of fact, while many people try to impose some religious or other meaning on monogamous marriage, the real situation is that monogamy and polygamy are property-based concepts. In societies without a strong notion of private property, polygamy tends to be the norm. Monogamy came about when there was property to divide. Multiple wives and an overabundance of children can really whittle down the family's land holdings, once daddy goes to his eternal reward. So, is it ever possible to use a slippery-slope type argument without having your case fall flat on its face? The short answer is "Yes." The long answer, as usual, is longer. Slippery slopes mostly fail when you try to make an absolute answer about A based on an absolute claim about Z. However, some people -- and I've been one of them -- are often accused of making a slippery-slope argument when they are doing something entirely different. One valid argument often accused of being a slippery-slope fallacy is what I call the "Cautionary" argument. This is where someone urges caution in adopting A, until we determine whether it leads to an unacceptable Z, whether Z is really unacceptable, and whether we can put safeguards in place to prevent ending up somewhere we don't really want to be. A good example is cloning. Many people are opposed to the idea of cloning, and some of those people rely on unsupportable arguments, including a slippery slope in which it will end up in cloning human-animal hybrids -- something I imagine would make marrying Rover, as Senator Santorum fears, totally unnecessary. Personally, I'm not a big fan of jumping into cloning with both feet, until we've had a chance to see where it might lead, whether those outcomes are acceptable and -- if unacceptable -- why, and whether there are safeguards we can put in place to prevent the outcomes we don't want. This isn't a slippery slope argument against cloning, as some have accused me of, but rather injecting a note of caution, so that we don't end up wishing we could turn back the clock or stuff the genie back into the bottle, as we've done in other areas involving a poorly thought-out adoption of technology. Technology, it is said, carries its own momentum. We adopt it because we can. The bean counters obsess on "time to market" Everyone wants to be an "early adopter," using today's lingo, leaving it to the ethicists to wait until the smoke of battle has cleared and then ride onto the field and shoot the wounded. You don't get anywhere in the boardroom by throwing up ethical red flags. The ethicists usually get called in when things are pretty botched up to begin with -- although it should be just the reverse. We saw this with modern medical technology. As new technologies developed in the middle of the last century, they were adopted out of the box. People were resuscitated, revived, hooked up to one machine after another, medicated, over-treated, re-medicated, and hooked to more machines. One day, and that was in the mid-'70s, someone looked up and said "Ooops. We need to think about this." By then, the genie was out of the bottle. We've made great strides in medical ethics since then, but it's been a lot harder battle than it had to be. In a more up-to-date example, there's the fragility of the Internet, on which so much of our critical infrastructure now relies. The untold story is that Internet "security" is a cruel joke. In fact, I've heard reliable claims that many executives of financial institutions and e-commerce companies are literally quaking in their boots about the possibility of a major catastrophe. They won't go on the record about this for fear of scaring customers, and, because many of them have dismantled and discarded brick-and-mortar operations, they can't backtrack to a more secure environment. We have basically built a financial infrastructure on an inherently flawed system, mostly because "time to market" and "early adoption" ruled the roost, instead of a cautionary approach that examined possible ramifications and whether necessary safeguards were in place. The short answer is: they weren't. Another false claim of slippery-slope fallacy comes when someone argues against something because of predictable behavior. Sometimes, this is a fallacy because the so-called predictable behavior is merely fantasy. Often, however, it's more solid. You don't let your high-school age kids have a party with a keg of beer and no adult supervision. Now, are there high school kids somewhere who would ignore the keg and instead spend the night in a game of charades in which they act out bible stories? Perhaps. But we have an awful lot of data that allows us to accurately predict a seamier ending to the evening. This is why it's a bad idea to leave kids unsupervised -- without or without a keg. So, arguing that leaving the kids alone with a keg will lead to an unacceptable scenario isn't a fallacious slippery slope, but merely a lesson learned from experience, and -- we can only hope -- the experience of others parents. FALLACY OF THE WEEK: Because people responded so well to the discussion of fallacies, I figured I would introduce you to more on a regular basis. This week's entry: The Red Herring. The Red Herring's name comes from an old practice in which someone would drag a smoked and salted fish -- a red herring -- across a trail in order to throw dogs off the scent they were following. It was meant as a distraction and a diversion. The Red Herring fallacy serves the same purpose by introducing a "fact," which may or may not be true, but is nonetheless irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Current example: Try to have a discussion with someone about the effect of rising fuel prices on the economy and you can bet dollars to donuts that the other person will introduce the "fact" that people in Europe pay more for gasoline than we do. You don't need to do a lot of research. They do. So, you could go on to explain that Europeans don't have the same fuel dependency that we do, because the areas are smaller, people don't commute as far to work as we do, and goods and services don't have to be trucked as far. The high fuel prices come mainly from higher taxes, which are used to construct and maintain extensive and highly efficient public transportation systems -- further reducing fuel dependency. Of course, once you've done that, you've been distracted and diverted from discussing the devastating effects of higher fuel prices on our teetering economy. The price of gas in Europe, like the price of tea in China, has nothing to do with the relative performance of our economy from one quarter to the next or one year to the next. If you fall for that Red Herring, you've been had. |
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© Copyright 2006 Carlton Vogt |