The slippery slope argument is the slipperiest slope of all.
Applying it in a disagreement is like spraying the conversation with Teflon®. Now it’s a question of which agreement is better, not where the right balance is…
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The slippery element in a slippery slope argument is the notion that political practices are governed solely by algorithmic mechanisms, and that human prudence is powerless to guide where the mechanisms take us or to control how fast and how far they go.
The very belief that prudence cannot exercise an effect means that it is factored out of discussions and is denied the ability to exercise its effect in deliberation.
We end up treating human affairs as engineering problems rather than the design problems they truly are.
We were discussing the slippery slope argument just the other day. I’ve been thinking that it is actually a relative, in a way, of the fallacy from ignorance: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You can prove that a given outcome won’t happen if you avoid a step, but can’t prove that the step won’t lead to the outcome and there for it likely will. It might actually be a lack of engineering principles applied rigorously.
There needs to be a word for that that covers the illogical aggressively presented as logical without adhering to the rules of logic.