Not All Slopes Are Slippery
Let’s talk facts, not scary hypotheticals when making policy.
On any given policy issue, debaters on both sides can usually be found using the “slippery slope” argument: the outcome waiting at the bottom of the opposed policy “slope” will inevitably lead to disastrous results.
Yet, somehow, Americans haven’t been stripped of all gun ownership since the assault-rifle ban of the mid-1990s; bigamy isn’t legal despite the Supreme Court’s recent affirmation of gay marriage; scientific research hasn’t screeched to a halt since the Animal Welfare Act was updated nearly a decade ago; and, President Trump’s rhetoric after Charlottesville has not seen monuments to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington fall.
Despite the frequency with which they are referenced, slippery slope arguments are largely hyperbole, often too abstract to be persuasive. The basic logic consists of arguing that “implementing decision A could lead people to see B as less extreme and thus more acceptable.” Or, the more extreme version of the slippery slope, which is “If we allow A we must allow B, from which C follows and then D, which is clearly absurd.”
To use a current example, banning the use of bump stocks has been argued, by some, as a slippery slope to greater restrictions on gun ownership. The most common refrain is that if we impose any sort of restriction on gun ownership, that will lead to even greater restrictions, until gun ownership itself is illegal. Yet, beyond proclamation of a slippery slope, there is no data that logically supports the conclusion that the ban of one specific item such as a bump stock will lead to the ban of firearms altogether. This type of argument hasn’t come to fruition in the previous examples cited above, and it won’t happen now if Congress does choose to legislate a ban on bump stocks either.
Fear of slippery slopes dates back to our nation’s founding, when James Madison declared,
it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. The freemen of American did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle.
American history is replete with worries about slippery slopes that never actually materialized. For example, an early opponent of women’s suffrage stated that if we gave women the right to vote, this would lead us down a slippery slope to a world where all of our political leaders would become women. Nearly 100 years later, women only make up about 19 percent of Congress, in spite of being 51% of the population.
To argue a policy position more effectively, one should point to where the slippage might happen, focusing on the relevant distinctions between each progression of the steps that might take place. This would make an argument more persuasive and, more importantly, turn the argument from a mere slippery slope to a substantive conversation.
Returning to the current example of what to do about the gun control debate in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, while Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats argue in favor of legislating, so that a slippery slope argument on gun control occurs, and Republicans and the NRA argue the opposite, an analysis of empirical data conducted by FiveThirtyEight showed that neither slippery slope argument is supported by the evidence. Rather, the data showed that “narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns” were the only arguments that stood up to scrutiny in the context of gun-control policy.
The real issues hiding under the slippery slope
Unfortunately, this is not what either side is talking about. Instead, they are busy over-simplifying the issue in terms of their respective slippery slope arguments because, quite frankly, that is an easier argument to make. Having a more thought-provoking discussion about, say, the fact that two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides, not the result of mass shootings, doesn’t allow either side to fear-monger their base thoroughly enough to induce campaign contributions.
Moreover, the fact that most gun deaths in the U.S. stem from suicide shows not only that we shouldn’t be avoiding deeper policy discussions on controversial issues like gun control, but also that current policy issues don’t exist in a vacuum. Obviously, talk of guns that leads to talk of suicide leads to talk of access to mental health and the state of our nation’s healthcare system, another area in which politicians love to throw out a slippery slope-style argument. For example, who can forget Justice Antonin Scalia’s slippery slope comments about how if Congress were allowed to create a mandate where everyone must buy health insurance, nothing could stop them from subsequently forcing everyone to buy broccoli or join a gym. (For the record, neither of these outcomes have occurred).
As it turns out, voters’ minds are not as simplistic as some of our hyper-partisan policy leaders often make them out to be. Social psychologists have shown that people tend to view proposals more favorably if they are presented as a compromise between two extreme positions. Unfortunately, decision-making that is based on hostility toward political parties or advocacy groups with contrasting viewpoints only worsens the tone of policy debates at a time when the nation is already quite divided. Yet, according to a recent Gallup poll, a majority of Americans want to see political compromise in an effort to solve the nation’s problems. Instead, what we have seen in the Trump-era is politicians and advocacy groups spending more time demonizing those they disagree with rather than engaging in substantive debates on the merits of a particular policy issue.
Back up the hill
Although plenty of voters have taken the bait and subsequently taken to social media to express a slippery slope point of view, politicians and advocacy groups should rise above polarization and the resort to slippery slopes as the sole justification for supporting or opposing an extreme policy position.
Cultural changes in society happen slowly. They rarely occur at the pace of a skier gliding down a slope, building momentum along the way, as the analogy’s origins suggest. As noted by Richard Thaler, a professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at University of Chicago and frequent critic of slippery slope arguments, the fact that cultural change happens slowly allows our society to correct course, if necessary, rather than continuing to speed down a slippery slope, lacking awareness of what is happening. For instance, the passage of Prohibition did not send American society down a Puritanical slippery slope — rather, Americans realized they had made a bad policy decision and took corrective action to reverse it.
Likewise, although Democrats have been pounding their fists that gun control needs to happen, their reliance on a hopeful slippery slope toward a ban on all firearms is not only misplaced, but thus far, also unsuccessful. Similarly, although Republicans’ trepidation about any gun-control legislation as leading down a slippery slope that ultimately abolishes the Second Amendment, over-simplifies the issue and fails to allow policy-makers to address the roots of the problem.
Ultimately, we improve society and further progress toward reasonable reforms by expanding existing knowledge, listening to the other side of the argument and working toward cultural as well as legislative compromise, not by overusing the logistical fallacy of the slippery slope. For all of the clamoring amongst those in the media that this Congress must “do something” — the first step would be to stop saying everything opponents support is a slippery slope and start engaging in substantive policy debates.
