Friday, December 17, 2010
Slippery slopes
Reading the comments to my post on Will Saletan's distinction between SSM and incest made me wonder: are slippery slope arguments more powerful in legal reasoning than in moral reasoning? Saletan was focused on moral arguments against (adult) incest, and there does not (in my view) seem to be much of an obstacle in making arguments distinguishing adult incest from SSM. That doesn't mean you will find arguments in favor of SSM persuasive; it just means that there are readily apparent moral analyses of SSM and adult incest that are distinct from each other. As long as those arguments are available, I don't see much ground for raising slippery slope concerns. In law, though, there seems to be less and less moral analysis -- or perhaps more accurately, moral analysis has been foreclosed for certain categories of conduct under the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution (Eisenstadt, Roe, Lawrence, et al.). If law is pulling back from adjudicating contested moral claims regarding sex, the beginning of life, the meaning of marriage, etc. to the extent that these claims are perceived to implicate threaten overarching equality and privacy norms, then it seems that the slippery slope concern is apt. Even then, though, it might not be a slippery slope per se, but an already flattened slope that is just gradually being articulated as particular disputes are adjudicated in the void that has been created by the law's departure.
This is a long and rambling way of getting to the question: do slippery slope arguments have much traction in philosophy (or other circles outside constitutional interpretation)? I'm guessing that this question has been taken up by others in the past, and if so, I'd appreciate being steered toward the appropriate sources.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/12/slippery-slopes.html
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the
comment feed
for this post.
Rob,
I've trust you've read this (or a version of it): http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/slippery.htm
I'll just state perhaps the obvious point that, like all informal fallacies, philosophers tend to be presumptively suspicious of their employment in an argument. However, this simply means an assessment of whether or not a slippery slope argument or reasoning is fallacious is context dependent and requires a careful analysis of its claims in each particular instance in which it is invoked (e.g., are their historical cases, say, or is there empirical evidence that lends plausibility to the slippery slope claim?).
Students who learn the informal "fallacies" are often misled simply by the nomenclature: sometimes they're perfectly acceptable forms of argumentation (e.g., some are surprised to learn that ad hominen arguments, on occasion, are perfectly appropriate). For a nice introduction, see Douglas Walton's book, Slippery Slope Arguments (1992).* Walton has shown how many of these informal fallacies need not be fallacies at all (hence their 'informal' character), again, depending on their particular use in an argument or dialogue context.
As Eugene Volokh notes (one of the few opportunities I have to quote favorably from him!),
"slippery slope arguments endure partly because they are often cast, much more plausibly, as arguments that if X is done, it will become more likely that Y will be done — not that X and Y can't be treated differently, but that they won't be treated differently. These arguments aren't about logical consequences, but about psychological consequences (plus some other consequences). And as such they can't be rebutted simply by pointing out that a distinction could be drawn.
The other reason that slippery slope arguments endure is that slippery slopes do often seem visible. I say "seem" because it's often impossible to tell for sure whether X increased the likelihood of Y, or whether Y would have happened in any event. But sometimes there's good reason to think that slippage has happened, often despite the express insistence of backers of X that of course X won't help lead to Y."
* See his papers (most available for download) and books here: http://www.dougwalton.ca/index.htm