Slip Sliding Away
Simple Justice:
Logic, logical fallacies and fallacious logical fallacies, are the meat and potatoes of lawyers. Without them, we would have little to say beyond, “does not!” Believe me, that won’t get you very far.
One of the favorite arguments is the trusty “slippery slope.” The slippery slope argument is that one “action will initiate a chain of events culminating in an undesirable event later.” The problem with the slippery slope is that it fails to establish or quantify the relevant contingencies.
Paternalistic pedagogues like to argue about things like this, the relative merits of rhetoric and logic. Over at PrawfsBlawg, Rick Hills offers a screed against the slippery slope:
So why do patently unconvincing slippery slope arguments grow like black mold in a leaky attic every time a court makes a decision about sexuality? I think that we’ve used slippery slope arguments so carelessly that we are losing our intellectual capacity to draw fine-grained conceptual distinctions. Once one starts invoking the essential similarity of one thing to another, one can’t stop: The temptation to assert foolishly that logical consistency requires elision of any distinction not crudely cut with a meat cleaver becomes an addictive habit. (E.g., “You think animals have rights? Why don’t you let them vote?” “You think invading Iraq was a good idea? Why not China?” And so forth).
Vivid imagery aside (”like black mold?”), the slippery slope argument has been around forever and has yet to undermine our “intellectual capacity” any more than American Idol or the Gong Show (which, I hear, is making a comeback). It can’t be that “patently unconvincing” or we would have given it up long ago.
Eugene Volokh, explains:
It’s true that arguments that it will be logically impossible to distinguish a future case from this case are usually very weak. Very few distinctions are logically impossible.…