Thursday, March 1, 2012

Manly Thor's Day Special: the slippery slope

The first time I ever heard the slippery slope argument used was in a debate about abortion. I hesitate to bring it up for that reason as there is nothing that will cause people to turn their brains off quite like the abortion debate. Nevertheless, the point must be made.

I was very young and abortion was not legal. I didn't want to be there but got dragged along because an older cousin was taking part in the debate. And this very earnest girl, I remember hating her on sight, got up and made the slippery slope argument. And the sentiment in the room was all against her. There were heckles and abuse and she looked very close to crying.

Now a prominent group pf medical ethicists have published an article in a leading journal arguing not only that infanticide is okay but that babies are not actual persons. This is only the latest in a number of such things. Early proponents of legalization also insists that abortion would never become a common procedure. We also have abortion for sex selection and that too was derided as impossible. All these slippery slopes were raised back in the late 1960s and early 1970s and they were all denounced as irrational and paranoid ravings at the time. And yet they all have come to be.

No matter where you stand on abortion, no one can reasonably deny that slippery slopes are real. It is no fallacy to claim such a thing.

As I've said before, the single biggest distortion in modern morality is to treat morality as a matter of decision making. As if it were a matter of calculation to get the right answer. We persist in this notion even though we tend to think that, at least in some cases, there is no right answer. Even in matters that are clearly relative such as musical taste we treat logical argument as more significant than musical training.

I'd put it to you that the thing we all know is that the vast majority of the time the big moral challenge is not deciding what the right thing is but making sure that we actually do it. Most of us can go years at a time without having to decide what is right or wrong. Most of us can't make it through a single day without facing a situation where we are faced with the challenge of making ourselves actually do something we know we should do. We have to train ourselves to do the things we want to do. Otherwise our habits just take over.

Again, no one should have to prove this to us. There cannot be a human being alive who doesn't know from personal experience what happens when you let something go a little bit and then it goes a little more and .... The question is how is it that we keep convincing ourselves otherwise? How do we keep convincing ourselves that we don't have to worry about slippery slopes even though we are surrounded by them?

And, as I say, this is a peculiarly modern problem. Those "ignorant" and "superstitious" people in the past whom we all look down on were not perfect but they were smarter than we are about this.

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