Motte and Bailey, VII

Slippery slope fallacies are another of my favorite not-always-fallaciousnesses.

“If you give a mouse a cookie …”

It’s actually true, if you give a child a cookie, they will want a glass of milk with it.  Past that point I make no guarantees, but there is a bit of a slope attached to most snacks.

If you allow contraception …

If you let anyone you want to own guns …

If women can wear pants …

If people keep throwing their fast food wrappers out of windows …

If you normalize gay couples …

If you let religious institutions use money for playgrounds …

Yeah, a lot of those slopes do turn out to be fairly slippery.  In some of these cases you might think that’s a good thing, in other cases you might not.  Most people will probably have problems with not all, but at least some of these slope bottoms. 

That’s why there are other names for the slippery slope “fallacy”: the frog in the frying pan, the Overton Window.

Of course, sometimes there is a fallacy in play.  “If we can manufacture cars so cheaply, we’ll have flying cars by 1980!”

There were inherent mechanical issues which, while they don’t quite rule flying cars out, making them at least rather more difficult than our grandparents hoped they might be.  The fallacy lay in not recognizing the bumps on the slope.

But not all slopes are so bumpy as we hope—and some are bumpier than they seem—and its really hard to tell until you’ve reached the bottom of the hill (or haven’t).