I never understood why "slippery slope" was listed among other logical fallacies. It is exactly the opposite.
Often "logical fallacy" is taking to mean "bad argument", but that not necessarily the case. A slippery slope argument can be a reasonable and valid argument, it is only a fallacy when presented as if A by logical necessity leads to B. But most debate arguments does not claim to be logical proofs in the first case. "Anytime A have been done in the past it has inevitably lead to B, therefore it will happen again". This might be a very good argument, but it is just not a logical proof that A will always and inevitably lead to B.
For example correlation causation is one that needs to be treated with care, but correlation is often investigated further by scientists to find causation. It does not prove it exists, but it does indicate an area fruitful to research further.
But the texas sharp shooter fallacy and cherry picking data does not make for a good argument nor serve as a useful indicator of where one might dig for further information.
The government using an anti-CSAM filter to further restrict, say, copyright infringements has precedent, so could be a valid slippery slope.
The idea people pushed that marriage equality would lead to people being able to legally marry their animals was fallacious because nobody could articulate a logical jump from same sec couples to interspecies.
You refer to "marriage equality", not "same-sex marriage". So you presumably think that the justification for allowing same-sex marriage is not some consideration of whether recognizing same-sex marriages in particular is beneficial, but rather that the justification is that they must be allowed for "equality". That justification easily generalizes to any other case where someone wants to enter into a "marriage" that is not currently recognized.
[ Note: Personally, I think the state should have nothing whatever to do with marriage, obviating the entire issue. ]
Perhaps the reason why marrying toasters is unlikely to be anywhere on the slope is that, from the government's perspective, a marriage is a legal contract entered into by the parties. It's not clear what a one-sided legal contract with a toaster would look like, beyond the mere recognition of property ownership.
One possible extension, though, could be marrying a corporation, since they have legal personhood. Perhaps that right will be moot once polygamy becomes legal, or alternatively someone will try to make polygamy legal by attempting to marry a corporation owned by their two intended spouses.
A slippery slope exists when there is a functional reason why one would cause the other. It's a fallacy when they're simply related by irrelevant association (in this case, their prohibition). Legalizing one thing for a good reason does not cause people to lose their minds and legalize dumb things.
Well, except that a polygamous marriage necessarily requires that 2 people of the same sex are married to each other. If the law still said that a man can only marry a woman, and a woman can only marry a man, then polygamy would be impossible without defining the number of people in a marriage.
(I suppose that technically marriage could be defined to be non-transitive, such that a man's two wives weren't married to each other, for example, but that would seem like an arbitrary and discriminatory restriction. Also, the government could give legal recognition to more than 2 sexes, but that seems like a point on a different slippery slope.)
Anyway, I think that for a lot of people, the insistence that marriage should be between one man and one woman was some combination of "it's always been that way", "that's how you create a child", and "that's the only type of marriage my religion allows", but SCOTUS set the precedent that none of those are legally sufficient to prevent a redefinition of marriage.
So it's not that one type of monogamous marriage is "closer" to polygamy than another type of monogamous marriage. The court doesn't have to take into account the wishes or definitions of already-married couples, and instead looks at what grounds the government has for refusing to grant legal recognition for plaintiffs who believe they are married to each other. I haven't looked at the specific rulings and legal arguments, but my impression is that states would now have fewer grounds for opposing a further, more expansive, redefinition.
I never heard of that idea before, but I didn't really know anything about how it is in fact defined where it is legal and customary.
I found something that describes the "Law of Marriage Act of 1971" of Tanzania:
"Under Section 10(1) of the Act, a marriage is defined as “the voluntary union of a man and a woman, intended to last for their joint lives,” and may either be monogamous or polygamous (or potentially polygamous). Further, under Section 57, no wife in a polygamous marriage holds a superior position in matrimonial homes than any other wife."
I read that as saying that polygamy consists of a set of bilateral relationships having one person in common, and not a complete graph of all possible relationships between the individuals.
The paper I found that in seems to be about issues arising in divorce in Tanzania.
The problem is stated as:
"Because non-divorcing co-wives cannot be a party to divorce proceedings, and only parties can claim a stake in marital assets, the LMA currently offers no means for non-divorcing co-wives to claim a stake in marital property"
This sounds to me like wives are not considered to have a relationship to each other, and that has social implications which are important.
One can't overgeneralize based on this one source and one country, but it tends to make me more confident in my guess that "non-transitive" is the norm.
In an alternate reality where the US constitution happened to define marriage as between "a man and a woman", I could imagine activists pushing for states to allow polygamy so that two men or two women could "indirectly" marry, and pressuring the government to avoid the issues experienced in Tanzania by writing laws and policies which effectively treat the connection between the leaf nodes as equal to their connection to the root node when considering questions of divorce, taxation, inheritance, parenthood, etc.
One great way of thinking about it in modern terms is thus: Rhetoric is Bayesian. You're operating on probabilities. There's a ton of things that are likely to happen but not guaranteed. There's a ton of questions to which there is a large field of possibilities, and one action can cause opposite effects in different cases.
One of the best examples in modern times is "Appeal to authority:" This Doctor say X is true, therefore X must be true. Even large groups of doctors have gotten important things wrong[1]. Thus, a logical fallacy - X says Y is enough to create a predicate as the beginning of a chain of logic, but it is not "Proof" within a logical chain. "X says Y. X is a Doctor. Therefore Y" is fallacious logic. Nonetheless, you should listen to doctors, because rhetorically they probably know what they're talking about on medical issues.
In other words, slippery slope areguments (like correlation arguments) are fallacies if they are claimed as definitive proofs for a claim being made, but are not fallacies if used as supporting evidence for a claim or if arguing that the claim should be considered a possibility that may need to be considered or investigated.
In bayesian reasoning, both can be used as evidence for some claim, that creates a new set of (posterior) probabilities for a set of mutually exclusive claims based on a set of prior probabilities.
For instance, lets say you are concerned that some president may end up as a dictator. In a democracy, the prior probability may be relatively small. Then, lets assume the country abolishes term grants more power to the president in some time of emergency. In that case, one could argue using a sliding slope argument that the risk that the posterior probability of the president ending up as a dictator had increased after being granted more powers.
But the argument that must be rejected is "this is a step in the direction of X, therefore it is equivalent to supporting X", which is a common argument and a bad one. Arguments in that form should be rejected.
In that case the slippery slope argument was a fallacy.
Furthermore we've not proven that the laws have been given up; the impacts of the anti-liberty legislation in the wake of 9/11 took almost a decade to sink in and enter the public discourse. The surveillance and enforcement measures used to enforce compliance through COVID are firmly still on the table. Probably help protect children and/or fight Russians or something. Worked in China, great impacts on crime, etcetera, etcetera.
The last time a pandemic of this scale happened was a century ago. True, with the destruction of animal habitats and climate change ( which feeds into the former), we'll probably see more epidemics from now on. And yes, the restrictions worked against that type of emergency - an airborne virus of pandemic proportions.
It's a fallacy to claim that now that we know all that and the laws have expired, next time there's an emergency of any kind governments will just impose lockdowns and do contact tracing. There's simply no basis for such an outrageous claim.
> The surveillance and enforcement measures used to enforce compliance through COVID are firmly still on the table.
Oh yes, QR codes surveillance.
Shouldn't the null hypothesis be that a lack of animal habitats means fewer animals and less chance of zoonotic diseases emerging? I know it's tempting to blame all the world's problems on climate change, but we need to be careful not to exaggerate things and give climate change denialists weak arguments to attack.
> Oh yes, QR codes surveillance.
You may not feel that these systems have been, or would ever be, used against you, but unfortunately people in other countries might not be so lucky[0][1], and bad uses of technology have a way of spreading internationally.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/cybergulag-rus...
[1] https://theconversation.com/chinas-surveillance-creep-how-bi...
Past performance isn't an indicator of future performance. International travel is more common and faster these days. Plus whether or not you buy the idea that COVID in particular came from a lab, the fact that it reasonably could have is enough to predict that viruses will in the near future. That wasn't as big a risk over the last century.
We literally need 1 lab, anywhere in the world, to combine lax standards with dangerous research. That isn't going to be a once-per-century event, it'll be relatively common. The world is a big place.
> and the laws have expired
So I'll readily admit that I haven't paid any attention to laws in the UK which is what we're discussing today. But "oh they've all expired" is an optomistic take. A lot of laws and policies can go through a parliament in a 2 year emergency where mass lockdowns are an option on the table.
So I'm not pointing to a specific example but I'm not backing away from the claim yet either. It is likely that many of the changes made haven't been rolled back, and that a lot of new powers still exist ready to be used in the next emergency. Sure they aren't locking down right now, great. But they've opened a lot of Pandora's boxes about how much power a government is expected to wield as a routine matter. What just happened in the west was some sort of bizzaro story from the tales out of the USSR or China. It isn't a the prologue to a series of great government policies, it is a dark cloud of what might be coming. We can't afford for these ideas to take root; freedom pretty much alawys outperforms in the medium term and I'd rather live free with some risk than watch people be imprisoned for their own good.
This but unironically. Do you not see the surveillance implications of having your p̵a̵p̵e̵r̵s̵ vaccine passports scanned everywhere you go?
They expired on 25th March 2022 barring a small number of administrative issues which have been extended.
Yet we continue as if nothing is off.
This is society, where politeness is codified in law.
I don't think those policies necessarily were a net benefit, either, particularly in the case of mask mandates for children, which weren't shown as effective enough to warrant damaging the mental health of children.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Whether they were effective or not is orthogonal to whether the slippery slope argument is a fallacy.
> Whether they were effective or not is orthogonal to whether the slippery slope argument is a fallacy.
That is wrong.
What you mentioned is the very definition of a slippery slope, where the conditional relationships of the hypothetical syllogism do not hold.
“this is gonna be a totally different country than it is right now. Laws that you think are in stone -- they're gonna evaporate, man. You'll be able to marry a goat -- you mark my words!” - Bill O'Reilly