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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".
Yes. Any argument for anything decent can be attacked with "this is a slippery slope towards..."
Building infrastructure like mass surveillance that can be used for good and evil is not a fallacy, but I wouldn't call it a slippery slope. The fallacy is, for example, arguing that a (completely optional) OS-level setting "is this user a child?" that gets sent to websites is a "slippery slope" towards mass surveillance.
Here, obvious issues are the couple, that they were allowed to go through surrogacy in the first place, the frivolous lawsuit, and that apparently Canadian surrogates are cheap and can be further ripped-off by forced arbitration.
There's a good argument against surrogacy in general: the state foster care system. Personally, I believe surrogacy is OK if the parents choosing it demonstrate extreme willingness and capability to raise their child (by going through extensive, tedious, and long screening, then paying something like $100,000), because then they would statistically better than the median birth parent. I still strongly believe gay couples who go through screening (not these men) should be allowed to adopt, because of the state foster care system: I'm confident a capable gay couple would raise a child much better than an incapable straight couple (even birth parents) and much better than Canada.
But let's get to the real argument: that the relaxing of social norms including gay marriage and abortion was a slippery slope towards the FUBAR state of Canada, which manages to spawn scenarios this catastrophic. I actually think there is something here, but it's not "gay marriage and abortion caused the failed state of Canada", that's a correlation error; it's that the world has changed, in ways that eliminated unimportant religious taboos, in ways that eroded religion in ways it was important, and in ways that created terrible bureaucracy and enabled frivolous lawsuits. The world was going to and will continue to change inevitably, and these changes can't be reversed, only repaired differently, like patching a stuffed animal. I doubt for example repealing gay marriage and abortion will reestablish good social norms, because they didn't cause those to erode in the first place but were a side-effect; instead, I think they must be solved in a completely novel way.
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