My newest post at The Art of the Possible is up.
To give a specific example: When I first moved to Oregon, the state had a rule against government organizations replacing…
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Eliminating unnecessary jobs to focus on the actual core functions of the Federal government is the epitome of increasing efficiency.…
Is government efficiency hampered by excessive bureaucracy and needless organizational inertia? Sure, I can buy that. I've worked for companies…
@Jacqueline+Squid+Onassis: Since the administration said that only people who were cheating would get upset if their checks didn't get there…
I can't wait to hear what RonF has to say about the efficiency of fascism when the Social Security checks…
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That’s really good. I like that.
I think your rebuttal is great (though if you responded to every right-wing whacko the Times publishes in the Opinion section, you’d have little time for anything else) but haven’t I seen that cartoon before?
I dunno. I think a social conservative could see Loving – Roe – Goodridge as a slope that HAS slipped. I mean, in 1968 wouldn’t most people have considered the claim that allowing interracial marriage might one day lead to legalizing gay marriage to be an absurd slippery slope argument? Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to be headed down this slope, but all the same I cannot see the slippery slope argument as falicious.
Reminds me of rant I heard from Strom Thurmond circa 1948 about what integrating the military could lead to. Pretty much everything horrible thing he predicted (interracial marriage, etc.) has actually come to pass. I am glad they have, but he was still right. Social conservative are absolutely right, thank FSM, that their world is slipping away, and the faster they let one part go, the sooner the next part will be on the chopping block.
That one’s going on my classroom wall beside all the logical fallacy examples my students have drawn! It’s a keeper!
Being a “slippery slope” isn’t necessarily a BAD thing. The basic form of the argument against “slippery slope” changes is “If A -> B. B is bad. Don’t do A.” The question should also be “Is B really such a bad thing?”, not just “A does not imply B”.
But if the things they’re arguing are going to happen are legalized incest, bigamy, and infanticide, then yes, it is a bad thing, and our best argument would be A does not imply B. Though the best thing we could do would be to back it up: why would A not imply B?
I don’t have the arguments prepared in my head against bigamy and incest; but infants are not living in another person’s body.
“I don’t have the arguments prepared in my head against bigamy”
D0 you have them prepared against polyamory?
This subject is something I ponder a great deal, because I consider family the foundation of society. I believe the only worthwhile goal wrt to family values is the mutual protection for all members of our society, and I define that protection as each of us having a rightful place within the framework of a family, a place which connects us to those who support us, connects us to people we support in return, and is not contingent upon our desires or the desires of others to deny it to us.
For all the difficulties and sacrifices expected in traditional values, their intent is to ensure the largest supporting family for the largest number of people. The weakness of non-traditional initiatives is that they seem to me to focus on the freedom of choice of the mature adults, the central figures upon whom all others are most dependent, to reject anyone who does not fit their pattern of the life they desire; the mother, the father, their offspring, their own parents.
This is a worrisome attitude to me. It seems little different than a desire to create a better America by not counting undesirables as citizens. I find it nearly impossible to imagine that I could desire to live in such a country, and nearly impossible to imagine desiring such a family. I could have been refused as a brother, father, husband or son because I’m not convenient or desirable? I could choose to refuse them in return? I just can’t seem to wrap my mind around it. Family just is.
Bjartmarr, this is indeed an old cartoon, which I threw up because what the hell. It doesn’t really match the post perfectly.
Decnavda, because A happened before B doesn’t show that A caused B.
I’d argue that same-sex marriage is happening primarily because of the gay rights movement and the end of separate spheres ideology. If those two changes hadn’t happened, but interracial marriage remained legal, there’s no way we’d be seeing legal same-sex marriages now. On the other hand, if interracial marriage were still unacceptable, but we had increasing equality for same-sex couples and no more separate spheres, then we probably would have same-sex marriage.
By the way, I have nothing against polyamory, although I have questions about the fine print of how such laws would work. But I just don’t believe it’s true that same-sex marriage leads to polyamorous marriages.
As I said in the comments on AOTP, the law, and social movements, don’t proceed based on argumentation. Therefore, saying “gay marriage is justified based on X argument; X argument could also apply to Y; gay marriage will therefore lead to Y” is untrue.
If polygamy advocates convince a wide enough swath of the public, and of elites, that polygamy is acceptable behavior, then maybe polygamy will become legally recognized. But until that happens, polygamy has no chance of becoming legally recognized — regardless of if same-sex marriage is recognized or not.
I have nothing against polyamory, [..] I just don’t believe it’s true that same-sex marriage leads to polyamorous marriages.
Isn’t this disingenuous? You said that it is because of several changes that same sex marriages became possible. If option A cannot result in C, and option B cannot result in C, you can truthfully claim to any opponent of A or B that neither A or B will result in C, while being aware that A and B in concert can result immediately in C.
This is the center of my concern with our rush to embrace non-traditional forms, the breakaway from a unified theory of family, which, despite its difficulties, is an attempt to place everyone within a family structure, linked by socially ordered obligations to care for specific people. Each alternative model relies upon the license to break some of those mutual obligations.
No single alternative model, in isolation, has the potential for a great deal of harm, yet out of their total number of alternative being asked for, it seems to me I can assemble the freedom for anyone to do anything, anything at all, even things you and I would agree are harmful.
For example, I would probably never get you to agree that absent fathers don’t have to pay CS if they don’t want to, that sounds horrible. But I think I can get you to agree that women and their children don’t require support from a man. That sounds nicer, but isn’t that the same thing? Saying it, without saying it? Allowing it without admitting it’s allowed?
If law and society do not progress based on argumentation, then why do we argue about them? I will agree that there is a lot more than rational debate going on, but I happen to believe that rational arguments contribute a LOT to legal development in a democracy and, over time, reason usually prevails. Not “prevails” as in reaching a logical endpoint, but as in the new position is usually more rational than what is replaced. The great social progress that has been made since the Enlightenment is mush more rational than the social order that was in place during the Enlightenment, and you will have a hard time convincing me that is just a lucky coincidence.
I do not think that Loving and Roe *caused* same-sex marriage, or that they *inevitably* lead to same-sex marriage. The conservative who responded to you on AOTP mentioned the Overton window, and that is a good way to think about this. Loving helped us redefine marriage as an institution designed for personal fullfillment rather than as an institution designed to transmit social norms. No, that redefinition does not cause or inevitably lead to gay marriage, but it certainly helps the argument for gay marriage. Likewise, Roe was a major advancement for women that helped to bring down the separate spheres ideology that you describe as a cause of same-sex marriage.
So, yes, stated in absolute terms, the slipperly slope argument is absurd. “Allowing same-sex marriage now will inevitibly lead to allowing polyamorus marriage in the near future,” is false. “Allowing same-sex marriage now will greatly increase the likelyhood that there will be a serious social and legal debate about polyamorus marriage in the near future,” is, I believe, true. As someone with mixed feelings about polyamorus marriage, I do not have a problem with this. I will just plan to keep an open mind and evaluate the arguments for and against when the issue arrises. But for a social conservative who might be tempted to just give up on preventing same-sex marriage, this might be a legitimate argument to keep fighting. If I am still going to be fighting 20 years from now, it would be better to be still fighting here where I stand now rather than a hundred yards back.
the reason why a slippery slope argument is fallacious is that it is arguing that preventing A will prevent B, and in allowing A, B is soon to follow. A logical fallacy can be a statement of something true, but it’s still a logical fallacy, which is not a sound logical argument.
A good example is a post-hoc fallacy (A happened before B, therefore A caused B) “I got sick last time I went to the beach, so I’m not going back for a while” It MAY be true, but assuming it’s true just because they have a specific temporal relationship is a fallacy. The fallacy in an argument is not an indicator truth or untruth, rather a fallacy in an argument means that the argument is flawed, and therefore is not definitive, and should be further examined.