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Is the slippery slope really a fallacy?
A story from Canada today that, by its very nature, maximizes heat. I will try to keep my own emotions about this story in check. Sitting at the intersection of gay rights, abortion rights, surrogacy rights, and ultimately the violence upon which all government force is founded, I bring you: Couple sues surrogate who refused to abort their baby over a minor birth defect
https://nypost.com/2026/07/14/world-news/couple-sues-surrogate-who-refused-to-abort-their-baby-over-a-minor-birth-defect/
Long story short, the baby had a minor heart defect
(the article doesn't specify what)and a cleft palate, and the adoptive men wish their now two year old child had been murdered and are suing the birth mother for failing to do so (there are also claims that she failed to keep them informed in a timely manner about these issues). Last I'll say of my own emotions on this is that this strikes me as outright demonic behavior and if I say anything more about my feelings I'm going to drift into fedposting so I'll stop here.The main point I can take away from this is that all of the Christian right that warned about various slippery slopes have been validated over, and over, and over again. The slippery slope is technically a fallacy, yes. But Christians repeatedly pointed out "There is no limiting principle here, and the arguments you nake to support degenerate behavior X are just as applicable to degenerate behaviors Y and Z and there is nothing except public sentiment (and not even that if a judge somewhere says otherwise) preventing the awful things we're talking about from becoming reality."
For those who lived through the culture wars over abortion, gay rights, and similar issues, have your feelings on the matter changed in anyway whatsoever over the last decade or two, and in which direction? And why, if you're able to articulate. For me at least, to quote the meme an old friend shared in our edgy groupchat the other day, "Upon further consideration I have decided to become more extreme in my religious beliefs".
Slippery Slope is absolutely not a fallacy and I'm convinced that its inclusion as a fallacy in high school/college curriculums is some sort of psy-op to create a population that will continue to give away their rights again and again and again.
Many of the formal fallacies - if not all of them - can be actually useful. Just go through them. Genetic fallacy of discounting argument based on source. Yeah, because nobody believes in arguments of their good friends over some randos. Fallacies of Tu Quoque specifically but also Ad Hominem generally: yeah, because it is so irrational not to invest into this otherwise sound looking investment opportunity, if the seller himself did not do it. Or why should I not discount schizo meth addict's opinion on almost anything.
In real life you have limited capacity to evaluate information, you don't know what you don't know, many decision are probabilistic and not exactly provable by formal logic, so you just use various heuristics when it comes to practical decision making including informal fallacies. Knowing of them fallacies is still good, but it is not some stone-etched principle that should railroad you. In fact, they are often used by skilled people for pure rhetoric - blaming somebody of committing fallacies left-and -right is by itself used as ad hominem, attacking their person as trustworthy source.
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