So, I’m not a fan of “logical fallacies” calls being used as a debate tactic in general. But one that bugs me most is “slippery slope”. I think slippery slopes happen, both for good and ill. I think the studied concept of the Ratchet Effect is kinda an obvious example. Does anyone want to discuss how they’re same/different concepts? Or other related things.
I think many times slippery slope is used to exaggerate what is at best a ratchet effect. That’s all I got.
But what do you mean by “at best”? Not as fast?
Slippery slope is often abused - there are, of course, many times when it’s not a fallacy, and in fact is a very real phenomenon indeed - in business, politics, abusive relationships, etc. there are plenty of situations where “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.”
Where it is a fallacy is when someone exaggerates the threat: “If we allow cigarette-smoking to be legal, then before we know it it will be legal to do crack cocaine in public.” Or “If we adopt universal health care then we’ll become Communists within a decade.”
IMO slippery slope implies a self-reinforcing or self-accelerating phenomenon. It’s easier to backtrack from 5 units downslope to 4 than it is to backtrack from 10 units to 9. And from 15 units downslope there’s no hope of ever slowing, much less stopping before you hit the “bottom”, whatever degraded hellish imaginary state that might be. As a result, taking even one measly little wafer thin step is necessarily an existential threat.
IMO ratchet effect differs from that in 2 key ways:
- There is no hope of return. Reversing course is flat impossible by the design of the thing.
- There is no acceleration effect. Going from click number 5 to 6 is no faster or slower or easier or harder than going from click 10 to 11.
So in some sense, it’s safer to go one click on a ratchet than it is to go one unit down a slippery slope. You’ve foreclosed returning that one click, but you also haven’t become committed to falling to the bottom.
I don’t disagree, but it’s important to establish / restrict the domain a little. For the artificial soliloquies of Philosophy 101, fallacies are very real and very applicable.
But for social / political questions, the real problem and the real progress of it over time is a million-variable hairball that’s mostly not understood, often completely unknown, and is certainly not included in the framing of the problem or the proposed solution(s).
In that far woolier environment, the various formal fallacies have some value as BS detectors, but the mere fact fallacy can be pointed to, doesn’t imply BS necessarily exists. And more importantly, the absence of a formal fallacy doesn’t imply an absence of BS.
The slippery slope is always a fallacy, because it involves something (usually several somethings) will inevitably follow from another thing without specifying a reason why.
That’s how all fallacies work. There can be some premise that would make it not a fallacy, but that premise is not given. You can even make ad hominem work if you can establish a premise that the behavior of the arguer is relevant to the topic at hand.
The fallacy is when the premise is assumed. It’s a shortcut to not have to argue that unstated premise. That’s why, every time I point out the slippery slope, I also point out exactly how X does not necessarily lead to Y. No, being willing to smoke a relatively harmless drug like marijuana does not inevitably lead to being willing to try harder drugs that are more dangerous. You can decide that marijuana is as far as you want to go, just like millions have done with alcohol or cigarettes’ (both of which are arguably more dangerous).
So the real fallacy is overconfidence in your prediction? Sounds like a judgment call rather than a fallacy.
This all seems to rely on the imagery rather than the real use and meaning of these phrases. A slippery slope and ratchet effect both mean “no going back” in most contexts. I would agree that slippery slope does imply the inevitability of getting to the bottom whereas a ratchet effect may be considered more likely to hit a middle ground.
But this is exactly how fallacies work. As Big T suggests. every fallacy has situations where it is actually true. If this wasn’t the case, then they wouldn’t be intuitively compelling and so wouldn’t be used in arguments.
It becomes a fallacy when it is expanded from slippery slopes exist, to this set of events will inevitably result in a slippery slope.
Said another way, implicitly assuming premises not given is an easy way to assume yourself into a false conclusion despite valid logic.
When said premises aren’t even out in the real world to be found and introduced, then reasoned argument collapses to “My fantasy facts lead to this equally fantasy conclusion. Because I said so. Neener!” Not much to be gained from a debate such as that.
Could be. But how would you distinguish the two? What are the critical indicia?
The main difference, as I see it, is that “slippery slope” is sort of an airy way of saying “I disagree this will lead to that” where a ratchet effect argument is more factually based on showing certain decisons are difficult to reverse and that there are reasonably assumed pressures to go further.
Most of the fallacies we deal with in every day life are the “informal fallacies”, which means they are an error of induction–and so will always be a judgment call. Rather, the inductive argument itself was a judgment call, and an informal fallacy (including slippery slope) is taking the position that the induction is weak.
I mean that something is implemented. It is usually defined and limited, so a ratchet ‘click’. People take that as say it’s a slippery slope, which the ‘something’ is clearly not, but well defined and limited in action. But going further, a lot of people say things are a slippery slope when there is no restriction, no ratchet. Such as a bus line rerouting, some may say it’s a slippery slope to removal of the line, or to unserve a area as a slippery slope, when it is often not, and also not a ratchet.
As a tool of persuasion, slippery slopery is usually a wild exaggeration of the likelihood of the rapid progression actually happening.
The ratchet effect is sometimes like that, too. However, some examples seem pretty firm. For example, When a power is assumed by a president, his successor is unlikely to let it go, no matter how much he grumbled when the first guy got it.
People who commit the slippery slope fallacy are not worried about the course being irreversible. They are worried about a one thing (something that may actually seem like a good thing on its face) triggering a cascade of much worse thing(s).
Slippery slope:
“If we make public colleges free, then public colleges will quickly fill with lazy lay-a-bouts and dumb bunnies and all the hard-working smart students will flock to private schools and public schools will be forever destroyed.”
Ratchet effect:
“If we make public colleges free, then we’ll never be able to reverse that decision because it will be viewed as an entitlement and getting rid of entitlements is damn near impossible once they become established for long enough.”
A person is more likely to be convinced by the slippery slope statement because it gives a person multiple bogeyman to be afraid of. A person may not care about the specter of free public colleges all that much, but they may fear what could happen if public colleges (especially their own alma mater) lose their prestige. In contrast, a ratchet effect argument is only scary for individuals who already have misgivings about a specific proposal. A person who is indifferent to the concept of free public colleges isn’t going to become un-indifferent just because you tell them that we won’t be able to roll the plan back once it’s implemented. The adoption of electricity and running water into our daily lives seems pretty damn-near impossible to reverse. So obviously the irreversibility of something isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
The slippery slope fallacy and the ratchet effect are two different things, and the former is indeed a fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy, is where you suggest that A will inevitably lead to B, C, D, etc without giving any reason why it will lead to those things. If you give a reason why, or there is already an established reason why, then it is not the fallacy.
Meanwhile the ratchet effect merely states that for some things it is difficult to go backwards, so progress tends in only one direction.
I guess people could invoke the ratchet effect in some situations where it doesn’t apply, but that’s not a named fallacy yet.
Note also that the ratchet effect can also be applied to positive phenomena; you could talk about a ratchet effect on civil liberties or whatever, but “slippery slope” is almost always used in the context of some undesirable state.
No they don’t. They are different and are different in important ways. The ratchet effect does basically mean that there’s no going back because the current state becomes the new baseline. This is not what the slippery slope means, that means that one small step in a direction necessarily means that various subsequent large, and extreme, steps will definitely follow. One is a argument about direction, they other is an argument about magnitude and determination.
No. I’m not sure how you got that out of what I said. The slippery slope is when you act like one action will inevitably lead to another action, without providing a reason why this would occur.
My example was someone saying that that “if you use marijuana, you will then inevitably use harder drugs.” That statement contains the slippery slope fallacy. It in no way establishes any reason why X (using marijuana) will lead to Y (using harder drugs). It states no premise that would lead one to that conclusion.
It’s not that I disagree X will lead to Y. It’s not that I believe you are too confident that X will lead to Y. It is that it is incumbent upon you to establish why X will lead to Y. That’s how (deductive) logic works. You make a claim, you need to prove it. You need to in some way actually connect X and Y.
Maybe what would be instructive would be a case where someone makes a slippery slope argument where I actually agree with the conclusion, but would still say that they didn’t actually establish that X would lead to Y. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble coming up with an example.
Maybe someone else can, so that they can see that the fallacy is there even if you agree with the conclusion?
The other draw of the slippery slope argument is that, like the straw amn argument, it lets you choose a reframe to issue to a field that is easier to attack. For example it may be difficult to argue that gay marriage is bad in and of itself, but if you say, that gay marriage will lead to inter-species marriage, then you can defend the much easier ground that allowing people to marry pets is wrong.