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.
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So from what I gather is it’s not a slippery slope if you got evidence, and if your not stating it as absolute fact.
I need a car for work. One thing leads to another, and soon enough I’ll have five cars and be super in debt. Thus, I should not buy a car.
That’s a clearly absurd application of the argument. Such absurdity shows that the logic is invalid through argumentum ad absurdum.
It is a fallacy when you do not actually show why X is sufficiently likely to lead to Y and Z to be concerned about them. That is, you’re not really arguing against X, but are distracting with a trivial argument against Y and Z.
You answered it in your question. The problem with the slippery slope argument is it’s framed as x ***will*** lead to y. It’s one thing to say x may increase the chances of y. It’s another to say if x happens it’s only a matter of time y does and then z not much longer.
It makes assumptions without providing any evidence to support those assumptions.
It is not an argument as much as it is a deflection.
Fundamentally, A argument (legit ones) require proof and logical deduction.
Slippery slopes USUALLY rely on assumption.
While doing weed = illegal = more likely to commit other illegal act seems legit at first glance, IT IS BASING it’s legitmacy on 1 single prospect, and then making more assumptions. You simply don’t do this. Just like how you don’t see a person being late once and conclude he have trouble keeping time and thus is a unreliable person.
A Slippery slope requires multiple stages and multiple assumptions, where A->B and B->C and C->D thus A->D. We know A =/= D, there is 0 correlation or causation but because you look at the flow of thought thinking “huh it has a point” thus you believe in this false statement. This is why fallacy are so powerful, not just because they are wrong, but because they can seem legit.
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.
Because they don’t always (or even most of the time) lead to the worse possible scenario. Often the Slippery slope is used to say only one (highly unlikely) possibility will result from the first action. Perhaps my favorite example was one that was used against same-sex marriage before it went legal. The argument went something like this: “If we let people of the same sex marry, that destroys the institution of marriage itself. If it happens, next people will want to marry immediate family members, and then people will be want to marry animals. We can’t let that happen so, same-sex marriage must remain illegal.”
By your own explanation it’s only true sometimes. Likely due to some coincidence or some other factors. If something is only true sometimes then it’s a poor argument.
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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