Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles SPEAKER 1: The last content fallacy that we're going to look at is slippery slope. Here's a pretty extreme example of a slippery slope fallacy. A high school kid's mom insists that she study on Saturdays. Why? Because if she doesn't study on Saturdays, her grades will suffer, and she won't graduate high school with honors. And if she doesn't graduate with honors, then she won't be able to get into the university of her choice. And, well, the rest isn't clear, but the result of all this is that she'll end up flipping burgers for the rest of her life. And surely, she doesn't want that, so she better darn well get serious and study. I've actually heard a version of this discussion between two wealthy mothers who were talking about which preschool to send their kids to. The gist was that if they didn't get their kid into a prestigious preschool, then they'd be disadvantaged from that point forward in ways that could ultimately threaten their future life prospects. So this was not a decision to be taken lightly. I did not envy those kids. Here's the schematic form of a slippery slope argument. It's a series of connected conditional claims to the effect that if you assume that A is true or allow A to occur, then B will follow. And if B follows, then C will follow, and if C follows, then D will follow. But D is something nasty that we all want to avoid. So the conclusion is that if we want to avoid D, we need to reject A, or not allow A to happen. Now, note that as stated, the logic of this argument is fine. In fact, this is a valid argument form that we've seen before. We've called it hypothetical syllogism, or reasoning in a chain with conditionals. Slippery slopes are fallacious only if the premises are false or implausible. Everything turns on whether these conditional relationships hold. Sometimes, they do. And if they do, it's not a fallacy. But very often, they don't. And when they don't, we've got a slippery slope fallacy. Now, there's a caveat to this way of analyzing slippery slopes. It's usually the case that slippery slope arguments aren't intended to be valid-- that is, they're not intended to establish that the dreaded consequence will follow with absolute certainty. Usually the intent is to argue that if you assume A, then D is very likely to follow. So what's being aimed for is really a strong argument. And that means we shouldn't really be reading the conditional claims as strict conditionals with every link in the chain following with absolute necessity. We should be asking ourselves, how likely is it that D will follow if A occurs? If it's very likely, then the logic is strong. If not, then it's weak. So in a sense, we're evaluating the logic of the argument. But it turns out that in cases like this, the strength of the logic turns on the content of the premises. So in the end, we are evaluating the plausibility of premises, which makes this a content fallacy, and not a logical or formal fallacy. For our example, the chain of inferences looks like this. Now, this argument is obviously bad at every stage of the reasoning. It's possible that not studying on Saturdays could make a difference to whether the student gets on the honor roll, but there's no evidence that this is likely. Yes, if you're not on the honor roll, then maybe this will affect your chances of getting into a top university. But without specifying what counts as a top university, one of the factors may or may not be operating-- like, for example, whether the student is a minority or an athlete. They might be eligible for non-academic scholarships of various kinds. Then it's impossible to assess the chances in this case. The last move, from failing to get into a top university to flipping burgers for a living, is obviously the weakest link in the chain. This is just widely pessimistic speculation with nothing to support it. So each link in the chain is weak, and the chain as a whole simply compounds those weaknesses. By saying this, we're saying that premises 1, 2, and 3 are not plausible, and so the inference from A to D is not possible. We have no reason to think that this slope is not slippery. Now, there's another obvious way that one can attack a slippery slope argument. You might be willing to grant that the slope is slippery but deny that what awaits at the bottom of the slope is really all that bad. This would be to challenge premise 4, the not D. Not D says that D is objectionable in some way, that we don't want to accept D. But this might be open to debate. Put away to the bottom of the slope is "and" then you die a painful death," or "and then all our civil rights are taken away." And sure, just about everyone is going to agree that that's a bad outcome. But it's not as obvious that everyone will find flipping burgers objectionable, or whatever this notion stands for-- working in the service industry, or working in a low-paying job or whatever. What's important in evaluating a slippery slope argument is that the intended audience of the argument finds the bottom of the slope objectionable. So this is another way to criticize a slippery slope argument-- by arguing that the outcome of this chain of events really isn't as objectionable as the arguer would like you to think. So just to summarize what we've said so far-- there are two ways of challenging a slippery slope argument. The first one is to challenge the strength of the conditional relationships that the argument relies on. When people say that a slippery slope argument is fallacious, they usually mean that the chain of inferences is weak. By the way, I hope it's clear that slippery slope arguments don't have to have only three links. My argument schema could've been longer or shorter. Now, second, you can also challenge a slippery slope argument by challenging the objectionableness of whatever lies at the end of the chain. If it's not obvious to the intended audience that this is actually a bad thing, then the argument will fail to persuade, regardless of how slippery the slope may be. Before wrapping up, I'd like to make a few points about assessing the plausibility of conditional chains. Fallacious slippery slope arguments often succeeded at persuading their audience because people misjudge the strength of the chain of inferences. They're prone to thinking that the chain is stronger than it actually is. It's important to realize two things. First, a chain of conditional inferences is only as strong as its weakest link. The weakest conditional claim-- the one that is least likely to be true-- is the one that sets the upper bound on the strength of the chain as a whole. So even if some of the inferences in the chain are plausible, the chain itself is only as strong as the weakest inference. Second, weaknesses in the links have a compounding effect, so the strength of the whole chain is almost always much weaker than the weakest link. To see why this is so, you can think of conditional claims as probabilistic inferences. If A is true, then B follows with some probability, and this probability is usually less than one, or less than 100%. So the probability of D following from A, the probability of the whole inference, is actually a multiplicative product of the probabilities of each of the individual links. Now, the odds of a coin landing heads on a single toss is one half, or 50%. The odds of a coin landing heads twice