{"id":5349,"date":"2017-09-17T14:52:15","date_gmt":"2017-09-17T19:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5349"},"modified":"2017-09-17T14:52:15","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T19:52:15","slug":"slippery-slopism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5349","title":{"rendered":"Slippery Slopism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ImageWandering about twitter this morning I stumbled on a couple of links I thought I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d share here. The first is an article by Steven Nadler, a philosopher at Wisconsin, who argues in a contribution at Time<\/em><\/a>\u00c2\u00a0that the one weird trick to solve America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stupidity crisis is a basic course in critical thinking.<\/p>\n

What is the solution to our creeping national stupidity? Learning how to gain more information from a variety of certifiably reliable sources is an important first step. But what the American public really needs are lessons in how to be rational, how to assess that information \u00e2\u20ac\u201d distinguishing between real evidence and fake evidence \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and end up believing only what one is justified in believing. We could use more lessons on what it means to be rational and how to be epistemologically responsible citizens who are familiar with the difference between a valid and invalid argument, and who know an unjustified belief when they see one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No argument here.<\/p>\n

The second link is a medium-long piece by Jay Nordlinger<\/a> of National Review<\/em> on the subject of Confederate monuments. Along the way to making the (to me, obvious) point that the Confederacy represented an unequivocal moral evil, Nordlinger went meta and made the following remark about slippery slope arguments:<\/p>\n

William F. Buckley Jr. used to warn against \u00e2\u20ac\u0153slippery-slopism,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as he called it. There were always people saying, If you ban Hustler magazine from the public library today, you will ban D. H. Lawrence tomorrow. Bill hated this kind of thinking. It was a kind of anti-thinking. People should make judgments, he said. People should exercise their powers of discrimination.<\/p>\n

I, however, have always been soft on slippery-slope arguments. And I make them. But I also think Buckley had a point: People should not be excused from thinking.<\/p>\n

If you dishonor John C. Calhoun, do you have to dishonor Thomas Jefferson?\u00c2\u00a0 If you take Calhoun\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name off a college within Yale University, do you have to raze the Jefferson Memorial? Do you have to change the name of our nation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s capital, because Washington owned slaves? Oh, come on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a clumsily stated but not unreasonable point. The only thing surprising to me\u00e2\u20ac\u201cand I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m willing to consider this a consequence of professional deformation\u00e2\u20ac\u201cis the novelty with which the subject matter is presented: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hey, have you ever thought about slippery slopes?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Of course you have. (Or maybe you haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, if so, you should; that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Nadler\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s point).<\/p>\n

The slippery slope is a bread-and-butter topic of any worthy critical reasoning course. Justly so. Sadly, as Buckley correctly suggests, people frequently abuse the term as well as the argument form (for abuse of terms see this post by Scott<\/a>). They do so especially when the matter regards permitting or prohibiting something. If we prohibit x, then logic dictates we prohibit y, and then it will further require that we prohibit z. The chain itself of increasingly horrible consequences does the work of the argument. In the present case, should we remove the statues of Confederate soldiers, etc., then logic requires we remove the statues of other morally problematic figures (like George Washington<\/a>) \u00c2\u00a0then there will be no statues (or something).<\/p>\n

Buckley\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s point is that this energy-saving line of thought absolves you of addressing the question as to whether reasons apply the same way in the separate cases. The slope is actually slippery, though I wonder whether we should use this term (maybe another time for that claim), when the reasoning applies in the separate cases. In these cases, however, what you actually have is a parity of reasons argument. The same reasons that allow x also allow y. A somewhat recent example. When the Bush administration invited religions to collect federal money for charitable activity, Wiccans showed up (to the dismay of the Bush administration<\/a>). A quick note on the slope here: I hardly think the Wiccans would consider themselves the bottom of any kind of slope.<\/p>\n

Sadly, Nordlinger seems to obscure this distinction and fall exactly into the cognitive efficiency \u00c2\u00a0problem Buckley identifies, only in his case rejects the possibility of a parity of reasons case out of hand. This is a point any (again worthy) critical thinking course ought to make\u00e2\u20ac\u201cnot all slippery slopes are fallacious. Fallacious slippery slopes is that you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do any real analytical work. The problem in rejecting parity of reasons arguments out of hand is to do the same thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wandering about twitter this morning I stumbled on a couple of links I thought I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d share here. The first is an article by Steven Nadler, a philosopher at Wisconsin, who argues in a contribution at Time\u00c2\u00a0that the one weird trick to solve America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stupidity crisis is a basic course in critical thinking. What is the … Continue reading Slippery Slopism<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2227,1078,1181,2225,792,1687,2226,149],"class_list":["post-5349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-confederate-statues","tag-critical-thinking","tag-jay-nordlinger","tag-parity-of-reasons","tag-slippery-slope-arguments","tag-slippery-slopes","tag-steven-nadler","tag-william-f-buckley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5350,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5349\/revisions\/5350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}