Broken Binary

The Fallacy of the Fallacy of Slippery Slope

Romans 1:21-22  Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,It is often said that slippery slope is a fallacy. But it is a strange fallacy because it represents something that we all see happening all the time every day in our life. I was thinking about this contradiction, and it occurred to me that there might be an obvious in fundamental logical truth, which works itself out as slippery slope.

Let me propose the situation. Suppose your society in general believes ‘A’. For long years everyone has believed ‘A’, taught ‘A’, to the extent that ‘A’ is just an assumed truth.

Then along comes someone who wishes to challenge ‘A’. it might happen that the ordinary mass of people who believe in ‘A’ start talking about a slippery slope. "If you give up ‘A’,” they cry, “then we will lose ‘B’ and ‘C’ and ‘D’ and perhaps even ‘E’. And the logicians all lift up their noses and start talking about ‘slippery slopes’ and ‘logical fallacies’. But is it? 

Let's look at ‘A’ as a binary. One can either have ‘A’ or ‘Not A’. One can either believe that ‘A’ is true or it is false.

Now let us suppose that part of the reasoning ‘B’ is ‘A’. ‘A’ is the premise for which ‘B’ is the conclusion. And ‘C’ and ‘D’ and perhaps even ‘E’. 

What has happened to our slippery slope? The unthinking multitude knew instinctively that a lack of belief in ‘A’ would undermine belief in ‘B’ and ‘C’ and ‘D’ and chip away at the edges of ‘E’. What started out as a logical fallacy has suddenly turned into unimpeachable moral reasoning.

And that is not the only possibility. It could be that what's going on instead is that ‘A’ follows logically from ‘X’. That a the lack of belief in A would lead inexorably if not immediately to the undermining of every thought that depends upon ‘X’.

Every thought and idea that human beings hold is connected to dozens or hundreds of other thoughts and ideas. Denying one of them is not therefore an isolated act. It is an act with profound consequences. It is, in effect, a slippery slope.