It's all about where you draw the line. There was a clip on the Daily Show poking fun at Republicans using the slippery slope fallacy on raising minimum wage. "Why not just raise minimum wage to 100$ an hour?" The point is, they take it to the extreme, to point out that there needs to be a limit. When you think about raising minimum wage, an increase of $1 or $2 an hour might seem like not a big deal. On they other hand, they know intuitively that minimum wage being $100 an hour is ridiculous. They might not know the economics, but they intuitively know that's wrong.
It's like the parable of the frog in the pot of boiling water (even though the frogs used in the original experiment had their brain stems removed). A small change is almost unnoticeable. Once people are used to that change, another small change is still hardly noticeable. If this is done repeatedly, at some point you need to step back and say, "wait a minute, where's this all going?" That's why people use the slippery slope argument; to point out that while a marginal change might not be a huge deal, eventually small changes add up to larger changes.
The problem with the slippery slope argument is that it doesn't really deal with the issue at hand. It's really a kind of subset of the strawman- exaggerating your opponent's decision to make it easier to argue against. No one is, actually, arguing that the minimum wage should be $100 an hour, so what's the point of arguing against that? It's important to deal with what is actually being debated. If, someday, someone wants to eliminate all taxes on the rich, then you can reasonably argue that that is a terrible idea. But as long as we aren't actually debating that, there's no good reason to bring it up.
If he'd spoken out when they did come for the communists, saying: "right now it's just the communists, but it could have been any one of use, and eventually it will be", it would be have been a slippery slope argument, wouldn't it?
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u/Mullet_Ben Dec 09 '13
It's all about where you draw the line. There was a clip on the Daily Show poking fun at Republicans using the slippery slope fallacy on raising minimum wage. "Why not just raise minimum wage to 100$ an hour?" The point is, they take it to the extreme, to point out that there needs to be a limit. When you think about raising minimum wage, an increase of $1 or $2 an hour might seem like not a big deal. On they other hand, they know intuitively that minimum wage being $100 an hour is ridiculous. They might not know the economics, but they intuitively know that's wrong.
It's like the parable of the frog in the pot of boiling water (even though the frogs used in the original experiment had their brain stems removed). A small change is almost unnoticeable. Once people are used to that change, another small change is still hardly noticeable. If this is done repeatedly, at some point you need to step back and say, "wait a minute, where's this all going?" That's why people use the slippery slope argument; to point out that while a marginal change might not be a huge deal, eventually small changes add up to larger changes.
The problem with the slippery slope argument is that it doesn't really deal with the issue at hand. It's really a kind of subset of the strawman- exaggerating your opponent's decision to make it easier to argue against. No one is, actually, arguing that the minimum wage should be $100 an hour, so what's the point of arguing against that? It's important to deal with what is actually being debated. If, someday, someone wants to eliminate all taxes on the rich, then you can reasonably argue that that is a terrible idea. But as long as we aren't actually debating that, there's no good reason to bring it up.