Fallacies of the Slippery Slope Argument
H. William Batt
[The author believes the "slippery slope"
argument is often used to close off reasoned discussion on issues by
raising specious fears in the electorate. by H. William Batt, Ph.D.]
About the Author
Bill Batt holds an A.B. from the University of
Massachusetts and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the State
University of New York at Albany. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer
in Thailand from 1962 to 1965. He has taught at several colleges
before joining the staff of the New York State Legislative
Commission on Critical Transportation Choices and the Tax Study
Commission. Since 1992 he has been a consulting associate on
matters of tax policy as they relate to transportation, land use
and the environment. For a decade ending in 1997, he was also
the founder and driving force of the Hemlock Society of New
York, serving as a Board member and officer of the National
Hemlock Society as well. He belongs to the Albany Torch Club.
Presented to the Albany, New York Torch club January 3, 2000. |
Introduction
During the height of debate about American involvement in Vietnam,
the argument was frequently made that, if we didn't stop the
communists in Southeast Asia, they would be at the shores of
California in five or ten years. The challenge to America, it was
proposed, was to stop the initiatives far from where there would be
any danger threatening to us, even at great cost, and even if the
immediate threat to us was inconsequential. You will recall this as
the "domino theory,"1 one of the prime arguments for
American involvement in Southeast Asia.
We often hear opposition to a policy proposal because it approaches a
practice that "down the line" we find abhorrent, even though
there is nothing particularly offensive about the proposal itself. The
English language is replete with metaphors about practices which, once
started, will evolve beyond the capacity of our own control. We speak,
for example, of chain reactions (here the reference obviously to
nuclear energy), or of things being inexorable or inevitable once
begun. The metaphors are usually mechanistic and from the physical
world, even when discussing political, economic, social or
psychological dynamics.
Consider some others which you will recognize immediately. We must be
wary of "letting the genie out of the bottle," or allowing "the
camel's nose under the tent," or "opening Pandora's box, "or
"leading [anyone] down the garden path." So we must "nip
things in the bud," because otherwise we will "open up the
floodgates" and "if we give them an inch, they'll take a
mile." If you can think of others, let me know; I'm making a
collection of them.
These are known in philosophy as wedge arguments.[2] We're hearing
them more and more, perhaps because public policy matters are framed
by politicians and pundits in sound bite format. Search "slippery
slope" on the web and you'll come up with hundreds of hits. The
arguments seem, on their face, difficult to answer, even if we're
often nonetheless vaguely uncomfortable with them. What I hope to do
here is to explore in an analytic way what in these arguments is sound
and what is fallacious or preposterous. Some recent textbooks in logic
have taken pages to analyze these patterns of thought - but how many
of us have taken a course in logic recently!
In the realm of science and technology, from which most such
metaphors are drawn, there is sometimes validity to this mode of
explanation. Consider, for example, what has happened - or almost
happened - at Chernobyl or at Three Mile Island! We see the same
phenomena occur in the spread of disease and particularly now with
computer viruses, which have so many of the same attributes as
biological diseases.
The metaphor of the slippery slope itself comes of course from
landscaping, where mud or grass is so slick that one is hopelessly
lost once one has passed over the brink or the slide downhill has
started. More about this later.
There are people who believe that the social world is just as
determined and fated as the world of physics. But for the most part we
live our lives on the daily presumption that we do have choice over
matters and that we make choices as individuals and as a society. We
believe, for the most part, in the free will of people. Few of us are
doctrinaire behaviorists or determinists, and one is hard put to find
many social scientists or philosophers that defend such approaches to
explanation today. The behavioral sciences arose in an era dominated
by assumptions of natural law and later of reductionist positivism,
but philosophy has long since transcended the impasses which provided
the underpinnings of early social science.
It becomes particularly remarkable, therefore, to reflect upon our
reluctance as a society to confront certain policy matters because in
the minds of some they would "open the doors" to other
ethical choices down the line. We do indeed have choices, both as
individuals and as corporate institutions. Yet rather than openly
confront each dilemma incrementally as mature and responsible adults,
many would close such matters from discussion entirely because it
would "lead us down the garden path" to some forbidden or
dangerous realm or other.
Creeping Socialism
Consider some instances where the specter of the slippery slope has
often been invoked. We all are old enough to remember "creeping
socialism," the conservative bugaboo which we thought died after
Goldwater invoked it to damn Johnson's Great Society programs.
There was a time in this country's history when the general public
was largely incapable of distinguishing socialism from communism. The
first great Red Scare was inspired by A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney
General of Woodrow Wilson in 1919 to 1921 in the wake of the Bolshevik
revolution. With time this philosophy came to be thought of not simply
as misguided but evil! F.A. Hayek's book
The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, was a scholarly book,
published by University of Chicago Press. But it became a manifesto of
the right wing, a credo of a reconstituted 19th century economic and
political liberalism, unfortunately without all the premises which
accompanied early formulations of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James and
John Stuart Mill, and yes, the culminating champion of the classical
economic tradition, Henry George. Ironically, this was an age that
believed in human perfectibility!
Fears of creeping socialism were revived during and after World War
II, leading to McCarthyism and destroying the lives and reputations of
many artists, writers and other public figures, particularly in
Hollywood. Certain organizations had a vested interest in maintaining
confusion between the free-market social welfare state and
state-communism. Hence, whenever programs of a social welfare nature
were proposed - even to address those elements of an economy
understood as "public goods" and "natural monopolies,"
the specter was raised that a coterie of treacherous plotters sought
to transform the "American way of life!" Adlai Stevenson's
comment summed up much of the final days of this era with his comment
that "There's something else I dislike just as much as creeping
socialism, and that's galloping reaction."[3] I thought the
phrase had disappeared from the American lexicon, but a search on the
web site turned up several recent articles and news releases, one from
the Conservative News Service in Washington just this past March.
According to that article, "The greatest threat facing the planet
today is not AIDS, overpopulation or global warming but creeping
socialism, according to a group of conservative women gathered in
Washington, D.C. this week for an international conference."[4]
Democratic governor Jim Hunt of North Carolina had his health care
proposals met with the editorial comment that "It's time to call
a halt to the creeping socialism that threatens to destroy this nation
one program at a time. If the goal is to provide health care for
children, there are any number of ways to achieve that desirable end
other than implementation of yet another income redistribution
scheme.[5]
It appears that with the demise of the "cold war," American
politics is struggling to rediscover its philosophical moorings;
conservatives, no longer able to invoke communism as a bugaboo, are
reaching back to a pre-industrial era of laissez faire capitalism and
the nightwatchman state. One new alarmist of the right is Balint
Vaszonyi, a 1959 emigre from Hungary who by popular demand has become
almost a regular on C-Span's Washington Journal. Vaszonyi is an
accomplished musician, the former mayor of a Midwestern city, and the
author of America's Thirty Years War: Who's Winning?6 Emigres to this
country from regimes formerly under the shadow and control of the
Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Cuba most notably, seem often to have
attained unassailable credibility as political commentators. By their
concentration in certain geographic areas they have managed to
hamstring the foreign policy in this country in significant ways.
Witness most recently our government's attempts to deal with Fidel
Castro. Members of Congress from Miami have held high cards in this
byplay. Government to them is not the protector of the public against
rapacious private interests, or the provider of services when the
market fails to deliver them. Rather government should be opposed at
any and all costs. (This presentation was pre-Elian Gonzalez.)
Physician-Assisted Death
The debate about physician-assisted death offers another
illustration. "Euthanasia," taken from its Greek roots,
literally means "good death." And what person wouldn't wish
for a good death! Socrates' taking the Hemlock was an exceptional case
only insofar as the life he foresaw was not one of physical pain and
suffering but rather the loss of his identity as a person. He was,
after all, Athenian; to be banished from Athens deprived him of his
selfhood, his dignity, and the relationships on which everything in
his life depended. To lose his citizenship and be a "guest"
in another city was too undignified and compromising. Such a life was
worse than death, so at age 70 he chose to end it then. Crito, one of
the students, offered to arrange his successful passage to the city of
Thessaly, but Socrates declined. The Pythagoreans, a minority sect,
opposed suicide, but a far larger element of the population accepted
it. Herodotus, the teacher of Hippocrates, is known to have written
that "when life is so burdensome, death has become for man a
sought-after refuge."[7] Thucydides, Cleanthes, and Seneca also
chose to die by their own hand when their lives became difficult.
Many western philosophers have written in support of suicide,
especially in the face of pain and suffering. In our own time Aldous
Huxley, Henry Pitney Van Dusen, Peter Sammartino, and, yes, Jacqueline
Kennedy Onnasis all chose to end their lives on their own terms. Many
suicides result from the failure to find a doctor willing to quietly
help ease the passage in the face of failing health and continued
suffering, and the job is often then botched. Van Dusen, former
president of Union Theological Seminary, ended his life together with
his wife, but the drugs didn't work immediately and their final demise
was rather difficult. So also with Sammartino, the founder and
longtime president of Fairleigh Dickinson University and the driving
force for the restoration of Ellis Island, who shot himself and his
wife in their New Jersey home. Hearing these stories shocks us!
The thought that anyone would ever choose - in any circumstances - to
die rather than to live is deeply threatening to a sizeable element of
our population. Despite polls that show that a full 75 percent would
in certain circumstances condone physician-assisted death, even in
fact choose it for themselves in certain instances, the debate has
been muddied significantly wherever it has been put before the public.
Physicians have quietly helped patients to die for as long as modern
medicine has offered the choice, but many people believe that the
practice should not be legitimized, or sanctified, in law. Better it
be done quietly, that it remain illegal as a signal to all that such
practices are not to be condoned by society as a general rule. Yet
driving the practice under the table hides it from public scrutiny and
invites abuse.
Nowhere more in recent history has the metaphor of the slippery slope
been employed than by opponents of assisted death. It has been the
most effective argument in thwarting the passage of laws authorizing
such treatment. Ironically, most opponents of assisted death don't
employ the arguments that are most personally compelling for them. For
conservative Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Roman Catholics, the
matter is more about who decides - premises about the nature of
society, about the relationship between man and God, and about the
fallibility and vacillation of human will that are the most
convincing. But these arguments are not employed in the realm of
public debate, mainly because their advocates recognize their often
religious grounding and that arguments before the public have to be
made in secular terms, without recourse to particular orthodoxies.
The argument has been given newcolor by the recent appointment of
Australian Philosopher Peter Singer to be the DeCamp Professor of
Applied Philosophy in the Center for Human Values at Princeton
University. Not since the appointment of free-love advocate Bertrand
Russell to the faculty of City University of New York has there been
so much hubbub in academia. The Right-to-Lifers have been there
picketing daily for months, along with a disabled group called "Not
Dead Yet!"
Steve Forbes, himself a Princeton grad who sits on the University
Board, has carefully refrained from getting involved in this one so
far. But he's being pressed hard to take a position and get reversed
the decision on Singer's appointment.[8] What is threatening about
Singer's ideas, well articulated in over a dozen books, is his view
that quality, not simply the presence of a heartbeat, should define
the value of a life.9 It is personhood - the sufficient condition of
humanness, not the biological dimension which is only the necessary
condition - that should be the mark of a human being. His book almost
from the beginning provided a new philosophical foundation of the
death-with-dignity movement. Hemlock Society founder Derek Humphry is
quoted on the cover of the hardback edition, "Brilliantly debunks
old concepts and introduces honesty to modern medical ethics. [The
book] is a blast of fresh thinking that will attract great controversy
and debate." Indeed it did.
In an earlier philosophic venture Singer already almost
single-handedly launched the animal liberation movement,10 and he now
was arguing that animals in some instances should be more highly
valued than human beings. A graded continuum rather than a sharp line
should define what kinds of lives have more worth. To many people,
creationists apart, this has become the ultimate slippery slope! To
them, if we're not going to draw a bright line between human beings
and animals, and venerate human lives in an absolute way, then we are
indeed headed down a treacherous path. The argument about the validity
of the slippery slope argument has never been more sharply posed than
in the physician-assisted death and animal liberation movements. Yet
it's not as if he's said things that other philosophers have not said
earlier; it's that he's said them more clearly, more directly, and for
a more popular audience. This mild mannered philosopher has now had
to have armed guards when he goes about in public - a claim to
notoriety paralleled only by Salmon Rushdie!
Gun Control
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a
free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not
be infringed," reads our Constitution's 2nd Amendment. The
Supreme Court decided in the 1939 case, U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174,
that possession of a firearm is not protected by the Second Amendment
unless it has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or
efficiency of a well regulated militia. The Supreme Court has stated
that today's militia is the National Guard. Does this mean that only
for purposes of maintaining a militia shall the people have the right
to bear arms? Or does it mean people shall be free to bear arms of any
kind, for any purpose, at any time, in any place - beyond what any
militia may require? We are beginning as a society to face up to the
challenge of exploring the meanings, and indeed the wisdom, of the
second amendment in a context very different, and with instruments
very different, than the framers ever could have foreseen.
It may be wise that the Court has sidestepped earlier chances to
further interpret the meaning of the 2nd amendment; after all, it has
no means of enforcing a decision, and defining a law that can't be
enforced makes a mockery of government authority. Still, a consensus
may be forming whereby a decision by the Court may be acceptable.
Public opinion polls show that more than 80 percent of the general
public is supportive of gun control laws. Many people wonder what it
is about the American psyche that makes us want to fiddle so much with
guns at all! Yet our witness of the passage of the Brady bill in 1997
was an illustration of how a relatively innocuous provision that would
require the personal registration of handguns was vehemently opposed
less on the ground that it was a questionably effective attempt to
control the sale transactions of Saturday-night specials than as a
first step in the dismantling of our Constitution, the first step by
conspirators to establish a totalitarian dictatorship, and the first
step toward the eventual confiscation of all firearms. Adherents are
frequently heard on talk shows with the argument that Nazism arose
only after guns were confiscated in Germany. We know the political
power of the National Rifle Association, and its ability to mobilize
its members to shower Congress with messages at strategic moments in
deliberation. Interesting to me is the inability of our leaders to
articulate arguments that stand up to the arguments of the NRA,
arguments which, for the most part, invoke fears of the slippery
slope.
Social Explanation and Determinism
The slippery slope metaphor is a form of an "if-then"
claim: if X, then Y. Of course in mathematics and in formal logic
these statements are ubiquitous. Even in the physical and biological
sciences, research has given us a body of knowledge and theory such
that deductive explanations are not only possible and enduring but
necessary to our ongoing reliance in applied technology. But
philosophers question the applicability of this so-called
hypothetico-deductive model of explanation to the social world; in
fact few if any would hold such views today. Yet, at the time when the
study of societies first took on institutional form about a century
ago in the form of various social science disciplines, so impressed
were its founders with the successes of natural science that attempts
were made to emulate what were seen to be its rigorous methods. Social
sciences have never fully extricated themselves from these faulty
epistemological premises and methodological assumptions.
Today we know that scientific research is not nearly so formal as
such models proposed, and we know also that analogizing human behavior
to that of protons or trees is a form of reductionism that ignores
significant dimensions of human nature. The word "law"
applied to human behavior has very different meanings than when
applied in physical science.
Traffic laws are not like Newton's laws. Human behavior is largely
rule governed, rules which are made by human beings in their social
capacity. Roberto Michel's famous sociological "Iron Law of
Oligarchy" is not testable in any empirical way, and is true only
in the general sense that much wisdom of human experience acquires the
nature of truth. Laws of behavior explainable by deterministic forces
of nature are largely trivial in their importance. When they are
employed, such as in game theory for example, they illustrate more
often the dimensions of interrelationships by metaphor than by any
inviolate deterministic patterns.
To be sure, such metaphors applied from animal to human behavior have
achieved a certain popular fashion today, particularly in the works of
people like E.O. Wilson, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins.11 But it
is notable that philosophers of social science have kept their
distance from such works. Applying if-then models to human behavior is
accomplished by essentially eliminating whole dimensions of humanness,
and is reductionistic in its explanatory power. Human laws, rather,
are human creations, and are mutable, tractable, and sometimes
indeterminate.
Such an approach typically commits what Alfred North Whitehead called
the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," and what others
have often called the fallacy of reification. It is the mistake of
attributing concrete existence to that which has only essence, that
which has reality only in our minds. When human behavior is analogized
and then concretized in mechanistic terms, it eliminates the element
of choice and motive in our behavior. Although human behavior is
largely rule-governed, the consequence of our being socialized and
acting as members of a community and society, these rules are neither
cast in stone nor inviolable. They can be both changed and disobeyed.
There is nothing inevitable or inexorable about one choice leading to
another. It may in some instances have that effect - life goes on,
after all, and "one can't step into the same river twice."
But irreversible human choices are not the same thing as deterministic
slides.
Yet we have to ask, doesn't one thing lead to another? Of course. But
this is not to imply there is a logical entailment between one event
and another. The slippery slope metaphor asserts that social and legal
policies, once put in place, lead inevitably and inexorably to other
social decisions. Decisions in law or in politics are not made this
way, when they are made at all. Rather they are made individually and
incrementally, with great deliberation by any number of leaders
reflecting general public sentiments. Anyone who has worked for
political and social change in our society knows full well that it is
inordinately slow. Decisions are checked and balanced, reviewed and
revised so often that commentators far more often speak of "deadlock"
and "gridlock" than they do of automaticity. There is seldom
if ever any logical entailment at all between social events. No person
who has ever worked in the arena of public policy would ever regard
decisions and trends as inevitable. Only in one special instance might
it be argued that there is ever the possibility of slippery slopes as
applied to social decision-making: that's in the judicial policy of
stare decisis, or the recognition of legal precedent.[12]
Historical Perspective and Subjectivity
A second assumption of the slippery slope argument is that history is
a down hill slide, that people in the past were perhaps stronger and
more noble than we are today. Contemporary society, far from being the
march of progress in this view, is just the reverse, and that social
changes that mark turning points of history really usher in greater
depravity. History is not progress but rather the fall from a golden
age. One might note the fallacy of such thinking by using as an
example the expansion of the voting franchise in America. At the
founding of our nation, only white propertied males over age 21 were
entitled to vote, but we have seen the expansion of this privilege to
gradually include those without property, then to freed slaves, to
women, and most recently to those age 18 and over. Or consider the
evolution of medical treatment, or the expansion of educational
opportunity. All slippery slopes?
Technological Dependence
An argument can be made, however, that in one realm of experience
there is a linkage between one event or decision and another. This is
in the realm of technology. We can all recall when it was touch and go
whether 45 rpm records or 33 rpm records were going to become the
standard, or when the VHS videotape format was completing with
Betamax. We know what happens when one standard achieves a certain
dominance: it soon becomes ubiquitous.
Economists describe the outcome of situations like this with terms
like "system scale economies," "entry barriers,"
and "quasi-irreversibility of investment." The monopoly
dominance of Microsoft's products may be another such instance. It has
also been described as the QWERTY phenomena. As the story goes, a
Milwaukee printer named Christopher Latham Sholes filed a patent for a
mechanical writing machine in 1867, a project he labored over for six
years without much success from keeping the keys from jamming. His
machine had its type bars on the bottom, striking upward to leave an
impression on the paper. This arrangement had two serious drawbacks.
First, because the printing point was underneath the paper carriage,
it was invisible to the typist. Second, if a type bar became jammed,
it too, remained invisible to the operator. Sholes worked for the next
six years to try to eliminate this problem, trying mechanical changes
and different keyboard arrangements. In 1873, the Remington company
licensed the design from Scholes, first using the name "typewriter,"
and using the same keyboard layout that Sholes had originally
designed. Remington changed the keyboard layout, but it was too late:
the earliest typists had already learned to use the Sholes design. And
we've been stuck with QWERTY ever since.[13]
Consider another pattern, which I also owe to a web site.[14] The US
Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5
inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US
railroads were built by English expatriates. Why did the English
people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built
by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the
gauge they used.
Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who
built the trams used the same jigs and tools that they used for
building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Okay! Why did the
wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any
other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance
roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts.
So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in
Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions.
The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? The initial ruts,
which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons,
were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made
for or by Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel
spacing. Thus, we have the answer to the original questions. The
United State standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives
from the original specification for Imperial Roman army war chariots
which were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of
two war horses.
Some explanations reflect downright corruption. The earliest cars
manufactured in this country and in Europe were electric; streetcars
also were largely electric powered until a conspiracy of the
automobile and petroleum industry exerted its force to ensure that
fossil fuel powered motor vehicles would dominate our transportation
and land use patterns.[15] Our motor-vehicle-dependent and urban
sprawl configurations can be explained by powerful interests
continually pressing for policies to make us so. One might even
conclude that the decision to drive on the right side of the road was
equally as much a defining moment.
And I hope that you will forgive me for mentioning another great
conspiracy in American history, the subject of my Torch presentation
about four years ago. That story recounted how the American railroad
industry, in collusion with the banks, induced the founders of the
American economics profession to change definitions and formulas so
that they would be relieved of taxation on their land holdings and
speculation would be rewarded.[16] This dividing line between
classical and neoclassical economics is responsible I believe for many
of our economic problems today - economic cycles, an inequitable tax
structure, poverty and unemployment, urban sprawl and the gutting of
urban centers. Only now is this economic ideology, almost sacrosanct
for a century, falling apart and seen for what it is.
Determinism or Perception? But are these examples
illustrations of a slippery slope? I don't think so, because they are
not decisions of social policy but rather of technical standardization
or refinement. Perhaps even the evolution of firearms is an instance
of the QWERTY phenomenon. One could argue that these latter were right
or wrong, but that's a separate question. Our views of social reality
and its explanations are colored very much by our philosophies, and
this is never more true than with respect to our evaluation of policy
alternatives. If we are opposed to a set of policy alternatives, we
are frequently likely to argue that their implementation is not simply
a mistake of the moment, but one with irreversible and far-reaching
consequences. We marshall all the evidence and arguments we can in
opposition to these courses of action, and, since they are policy
options for the future, we envision all the possible future problems
inherent in their adoption. This is true both of the right and the
left.
There is a difference, too, between explaining things historically
and attributing unilinear causality to social events. As it happens,
if our views of human nature and of social institutions are colored by
pessimism and if we believe that we human beings are by nature self
serving and rapacious, we are likely to have one view of matters. If,
on the other hand, our view of human beings, both collectively and
individually, is more optimistic and altruistic, our conclusions will
reflect this too.
This has been borne out in several studies of personality and
politics over the years. People with a dim view of human nature are
more likely to see conspiracies and negative consequences to what is
often perceived as social engineering. And people more trusting of
others and of institutional authority are less likely to be concerned
about the negative consequences of policy proposals. In recent
years, those wearing the popular appellation of "conservative"
- at least in the American sense of the term - are more distrustful of
others, of government, and of institutions generally. There is a
further corollary to this as well: that people who believe that human
nature is inherently selfish will tend to believe that their own
selfish behavior is only natural, and they will attribute the same low
motives to others that they use to justify their own behavior.
This further reinforces their own view that they are completely
justified in acting in the way that they do. Realizing that this is
the mentality that drives such people, those who take a more benign
view of human nature and of political institutions are then compelled
to find the motives of their opposites suspect and threatening.[17] So
such escalating distrust becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I would like to illustrate the dynamics of this thinking through one
widely used psychological scale, used in countless studies over the
course of some 40 years. It is known as the "Faith in People
Scale," originally developed in 1956 by Rosenberg.[18] One
point is awarded for each scaled response. A score of five identifies
you as having a very low level of trust in others. I will read the
five paired statements to you, since they are very short:
- Some people say that most people can be trusted. Others say you
can't be too careful in your dealings with people. How do you feel
about it?
Most people can be trusted. * You can't be too careful.
- Would you say that most people are more inclined to help
others, or more inclined to look out for themselves?
To help others. * To look out for themselves.
- If you don't watch yourself, people will take advantage of you.
Agree.....Disagree
- No one is going to care much what happens to you, when you get
right down to it.
Agree.....Disagree
- Human nature is fundamentally cooperative.
Agree.....Disagree
So that's what it may come down to, not to a matter of validity of
the slippery slope argument as measured in logical terms, but rather
by the extent to which social decisions are made by people who can be
trusted and relied upon to act in altruistic ways. If people expect
the worst, the worst may happen. If people look on the positive side,
that trust may engender further such feelings and be self-reinforcing.
"What goes around comes around," as they say, applied to
both conservatives with a dim view of human nature and society as well
as to progressives with their more hopeful view.
There is a further dimension to all this which offers a fascinating
area for study. The faith-in-people scale along with many other
research instruments has been used in many societies and at various
times. But time has been too short in this country for us to be able
to say very much about what has happened over the past 250 years with
respect to public sentiments. The general view is that people have
become more cynical and pessimistic; what this portends for America's
future, and particularly the future of our political health, is well
worth pondering.
We used to be a nation of optimists, at least as other nations saw
us. That may have been our greatest asset. If we lose this optimism,
we may be the worse for it as a nation. And to this extent, our
declining view of ourselves and our motives may be the ultimate
slippery slope.
Postscript
I thought, because I just read it, I should add a postscript to this
piece that shows how much the slippery slope metaphor has crept into
our way of looking at things and affected our public policy formation.
Here I quote from Saturday's
New York Times, relating the work of a Professor of Popular
Culture Joe Austin at Bowling Green State University, whose book Taking
the Train will shortly be published by Columbia University Press:
[New York] City officials believed that if graffiti went unchecked it
would signal a general lawlessness and more serious crimes would
follow. This is sometimes called the broken-window thesis, popularized
by James Q. Wilson, now a retired professor at the University of
California in Los Angeles, and George Kelling of Rutgers University in
a 1982 article in The Atlantic Monthly.[20] "If you
allowed one window to break in a neighborhood and it wasn't repaired,
people would think you can do other acts of vandalism," Austin
explained. "Eventually this would become, 'It's all right to mug
and rape people,' and a general sort of social chaos would ensue."
The article goes on to estimate that the city spent about half a
billion dollars between 1970 and 1990 trying to eradicate graffiti. By
the mid-80's most of the graffiti on the subway cars was cleaned up.
Austin argues that crime on the subways during those 20 years did not
significantly decrease. "The correlation between graffiti and
crime had no basis," he said. He pointed out that most experts
don't subscribe to the "broken windows" hypothesis, holding
the economy to be the dominant determinant. But we did spend lots of
money on a theory which had nothing more than plausibility behind it.
Notes:
- From Laurence Urdang (ed.),
Picturesque Expressions: A Thematic Dictionary, Detroit: Gale
Research Co., 1980, p 52: "Domino Theory: The belief that if
one of a cluster of small neighboring countries is taken over by
communism or some other political system the others will soon
follow suit; the phenomenon of political chain reaction. This
theory takes it name from the chain reaction effect created when
one in a line of standing dominos topples, bringing the rest down,
one after another. The concept arose during the 1950's and was
popular during the sixties as the expression most representative
of the basis for American involvement in Southeast Asia at the
time."
- Anthony Flew, Thinking
Straight, Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1977, pp. 103 ff. See also
www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html; and
www.loyno.edu/~wagues/fallacies.html.
- Adlai Stevenson Quotes, at
http://www.cp-tel.net/miller/BilLee/quotes/Adlai.html.
- "Women Meet to Discuss
Global Conservatism," Washington: Conservative News Service,
March 31, 1999.
- "Health Care Plan Reeks
of Socialism,"Jacksonville (NC) Daily News, March 3, 1998
- New York: Regnery Press,
1998.
- From the frontispiece, Derek
Humphry, The Right to Die: Understanding Euthanasia, Hemlock
Society, 1990.
- David Oderberg, "Good
Riddance to a Warped Philosopher," The Age, (Melbourne),
April 28, 1999; Gay Alcorn, "Life and Death Matters,"
Sydney (AUS) Morning Herald, May 8, 1999; James Bandler, "Furor
Follows Princeton Philosopher," Boston Globe, July 27, 1999;
Paula Span, "Philosophy of Death: Bioethicist Peter Singer's
Views on Euthanasia Foment Debate," Washington Post, December
9, 1999.
- Peter Singer, Rethinking Life
and Death, New York: St. Martins Press, 1994.
- Peter Singer, Animal
Liberation: A New Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, New York:
Avon Books, 1975.
- Edward O. Wilson, On Human
Nature, Harvard University Press, 1988; Consilience, New York:
A.A. Knopf, 1998; Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford U.
Press, 1990; Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution
and the Meanings of Life, New York: Touchstone Books, 1996.
- Wibren van der Burg, "The
Slippery-Slope Argument," Ethics, Vol. 102 (1991): 42-65;
reprinted in The Journal of Clinical Ethics, Vol. 3 No. 4 (Winter,
1992): 256-268.
- http://www.superkids.com/aweb/pages/features/qwerty/qwerty.shtml
- http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/
2493/rails.htm
- This is an untold story. A
trial was held in a Chicago federal court in 1949, resulting in an
indictment of GM, Firestone, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum, and
Mack Trucks among others. Their crime was in forming a holding
company called National City Lines which proceeded in the
preceding decade to buy up the public transportation services in
dozens of US cities, and then scrapping them so that people would
then become more automobile dependent. The corporations were fined
$5,000 each, and the CEOs of each one $1. See United States
Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, "American
Ground Transport: A Proposal for Restructuring the Automobile,
Truck, Bus, and Rail Industries," by Bradford C. Snell,
February 26, 1974 (Washington: US Government Printing Office,
1974); and Jonathan Kwitney, "The Great Transportation
Conspiracy," Harper's Magazine, February, 1981.
- H. William Batt, "How the
Railroads Got us on the Wrong Economic Track," Torch
Magazine, Spring, 1998, and
www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5148/batt_railroad_1.html
- A particularly insightful
treatment of this is to be found in George Lakoff, Moral Politics:
What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't, University of Chicago
Press, 1996.
- "Misanthropy and
Political Ideology," American Sociological Review, 1956, Vol.
21, pp. 690-695; reprinted in John P. Robinson and Phillip R.
Shaver (ed.), Measures of Sociological Attitudes, University of
Michigan Institute for Social Research, 1969, pp.526-528.
- Dinitia Smith, "Rethinking
the Graffiti Wars," New York Times, Saturday, January 1,
2000, D1.
- See also George L. Kelling and
Catherine M. Coles, Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and
Reducing Crime in Our Communities, New York: The Free Press, 1996.
|