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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".
Without getting into the specifics of this individual case...
As Freddie said long ago, social conservatives have a really good track record when it comes to predictions. Generally they predict some consequence (which they consider negative) to a social change, the social change happens, and then the consequence happens exactly as predicted.
When I was a teenager, I was pretty thoughtlessly liberal on all the major social issues - or at least, on all the ones that I understood. I grew up in an atmosphere where it was just taken as axiomatic that of course social conservatives are wrong, and usually motivated by a combination of fear, ignorance, and bigotry, and all of history is a long scroll of them being wrong about everything. As I got older, I started to realise that that isn't always true, and then eventually realised that, hang on, they have in fact mostly been right. They haven't been correct in every single instance, but they have gotten most of them.
Today, I often see something I think of as an inverse boy-who-cried-wolf, where the social conservatives cry wolf, progressives/liberals/mainstream all loudly insist that there is no wolf, then a wolf eats a sheep, and then the next day the process begins all over again.
I remember a few months ago running into a tweet where someone said that they won't take conservatives seriously until they admit they were wrong on gay marriage and apologise. Naturally the conservatives say, "well, no, because we weren't wrong on gay marriage", and really, with every year that passes, I feel like the evidence is mounting that they were right.
My favourite example of this was when Scott recounted an anecdote in which he was talking to a friend and saying that he couldn't understand the classical prohibition on homosexuality, and his friend pointed out that the destigmatisation of homosexuality directly precipitated one of the worst pandemics in human history, killing young men in their millions. Even living in the Bay Area, in a social milieu with a disproportionate share of LGBT people; even being an avid GK Chesterton enjoyer; even being a qualified medical doctor who has probably read experimental studies about antiretrovirals and PrEP, it still didn't occur to him how the AIDS epidemic completely and utterly vindicated the stigmatisation of homosexuality. This isn't even a case where he failed to see how tearing down a particular Chesterton's fence could have hypothetical negative consequences down the line: this is where tearing down a particular Chesterton's fence did have extremely negative consequences decades prior and still does, and yet it didn't occur to him, even though it's a reality he's confronted with every day.
The article I was thinking about was "Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad" (archive link):
The passage quoted above is taken from the archive link. If you go to the version of "Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad" on the website, it's gone, with the note: "Deleted a controversial section which I still think was probably correct, but which given the number of objections wasn’t provably correct enough to be worth including." Never change, Scott.
Scott was living two blocks from downtown Hiroshima and asking why everybody got so nervous about nuclear weapons.
On the other hand, like 5 comments upthread, @ArjinFerman is telling us that the AIDS crisis was oversold. (I really wanted to gloss his complaint as “fake and gay,” but figured that could be mistaken for mockery). There’s clearly some sense where he’s correct, and HIV will see use as a political lever long after everyone who knew a victim is also dead.
I’m not sure how to square this other than a rather uncomfortable model: the amount of suffering around us at all times is literally inconceivable, but your brain works really hard to filter it out. Turn off too many of those filters and you end up going mad and/or effective altruist.
No, I'm saying it was self-inflicted, and doesn't deserve more thought than a "men purposefully hitting their own balls with a hammer" epidemic. That the expectation that society would drop everything and save people who refused to take the barest of precautions, when their own lives were on the line, and they only did so for the purpose of sexual gratification (which they didn't even have to abstain from, just limit to a reasonable level), was deranged, as was the implicit (and sometimes explicit) moral judgement when society failed to act fast enough.
Decades later we put half of the world under lockdown over a glorified flu, and anyone who didn't wear a mask when they were entering a restaurant, where they could sit without it for hours, was seen as a moral freak, but somehow we have to look at the AIDS episode as a giant tragedy, because it got in the way of a bunch of guys having unlimited orgasms. Then, to add insult to injury, we immediately dropped all Covid-era moral norms, when the same community brought in monkeypox.
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