<< Critical | Front Page | Reader-Response and the Editorial Experience; or, To Them? No. To Me. >>
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Back on the Slippery Slope
I can hardly address all of Eugene Volokh’s arguments “in defense of the slippery slope,” but I do want to consider what appears to me his strongest one. Basically, it’s the “thin edge of the wedge” argument mentioned in the comments to my previous post on slippery slopes—or, perhaps, better described as “if you give them an inch, they will be much better positioned to take a mile.”
Basically, then, Volokh is interested in the kind of case I only gestured toward parenthetically in my first post: the case of a group that is trying to manipulate others toward a final outcome that those opponents would only come to accept by degrees. Here’s Volokh: “And so long as this happens—so long as our support of one political or legal decision today can change people’s attitudes and thus lead them to enact another decision later—we have to take this sort of mechanism into account when deciding on an initial proposal.”
Here’s two concrete examples. 1) It is often argued that the Nazis acclimated the German people to extreme anti-Semitism by degrees. They could not have begun by declaring German Jews unfit to live, but, by a slow process of ostracism and dehumanization, they made the final disappearance of German Jews into the camps unremarkable when it finally occurred. (The case of non-German Jews is entirely different since that did not involve any need to negotiate German public opinion.) 2) Truman’s integration of the military in 1948, in the face of dire threats about what it would do to military morale, provided a first instance of real integration (to be followed shortly thereafter by the integration of baseball by Jackie Robinson). The two initiatives began the slow, but fairly steady, progress toward racial integration in the US.
The point is that people are shaped by their experiences. Certainly, we would not have it any other way. Volokh’s argument, then, is a warning against habituation. You start down the path toward killing Jews when you make them register as Jews and then wear yellow stars; you start down the path toward integration when you allow blacks to participate in any public activity as equals. Don’t believe any protests by the innovators that they intend to stop at this reform; they want the whole cake, not a piece of it, and their small reform is a matter of policy, of manipulation, of consolidating and/or legitimating their power so as to make the next step easier.
I have three comments on this line of thinking. 1) It, like all slippery slope arguments, immediately pushes us to extremes. Slippery slope arguments basically insist that, in the case at hand at least (and maybe for all cases), no intermediate positions are possible. You can’t stop the momentum until the “logical” and “final” point is reached. That’s why slippery slope arguments are always inflammatory and often hysterical. They deny the possibility of moderation. And that’s why, as was also noted in the comments to my first post, slippery slopes arguments seem attracted by some unavoidable perversity to invocations of the Nazis.
2) Crucially, the slippery slope argument shifts the argument away from the merit of the proposal at hand to the character of those making the proposal. The truly important question is whether these people can be trusted. In the political case, that means whether these people can be trusted with power. There are two levels here. Truman was not a liar; he said what he wanted and worked to achieve it. But he was not to be trusted to stop there. Integrate the military, and you’ll be asking us to let them use the same bathrooms and ride in the front of the bus next. The Nazis, however, are more insidious; they are claiming to want to do one thing, but actually are setting in motion the achievement of something altogether different.
Volokh offers another example of this line of thought: gun registration is not really about gun control, but is in fact a preliminary step toward the government’s confiscation of all guns in private hands. (Volokh doesn’t explicitly endorse this argument, but uses it as an example of how one action can enable a subsequent action.) Give them that power, and they are much better positioned to do something extreme that they cannot currently do. The merit of the proposed action is swallowed up by the perceived dangers of subsequent actions that they really desire but will not candidly admit.
3) Slippery slope arguments of this sort push toward extreme partisanship, toward declaring your opponent someone who cannot be trusted with power, whose every move and desire is to undermine the existing good and to move toward a catastrophically bad new order. Certainly, history shows that some parties are not to be trusted. But the effect of generalized suspicion of all opponents is disastrous. Democracy—and the peace and stability it brings with it—is absolutely dependent on handing over power to your opponents if they win the election. Thus, all arguments that insist your opponents cannot be trusted with power threaten the very basis of democratic order.
But we need not be so extreme in our argument against slippery slope arguments. Ever-present suspicion of one’s opponents leads to the much more mundane consequence of partisanship: the adoption of the view that everything he is for I must be against precisely because he is for it and he is not to be trusted. For him to succeed in any of his endeavors, even worthy ones, would be for him to increase his credit and thus better position him to do the really bad things he fervently wants to do. In this form, partisanship, like the slippery slope argument, clouds any ability to examine the matter at hand on its own merits. By substituting speculative scenarios of dire consequences, partisanship and slippery slope arguments are very poorly positioned to aid in our evaluation of the merits of any particular argument or any particular course of action.
I can’t resist mentioning one of the weird consequences of partisanship (although it is not, strictly speaking, germane to the argument of this post): the case of usurping your opponent’s proposal so that he cannot get the credit of having done it. Disraeli’s enactment of the Second Reform Bill is the classic instance, with an erstwhile opponent of Reform actually bringing in reforms more sweeping than those the Liberals had proposed. Clinton’s usurpation of welfare reform is somewhat different; he would claim to have “moderated” the more extreme proposals of his opponents. And, of course, in both cases the whole effort to steal a march on your opponents is motivated by a sense that some change in the proposed direction is inevitable because of overwhelming public support for that move. So, if the change is inevitable, I’ll be damned if he gets any credit for it, even if it was his idea in the first place. Plus I get the added satisfaction of his fury at my having “stolen” his idea.
Comments
I’m pretty sure this isn’t worth mentioning, but Robinson’s first season with the Dodgers was ‘47.
John,
Thanks for the follow-up. First, a quibble. I don’t think it is generally true that “Crucially, the slippery slope argument shifts the argument away from the merit of the proposal at hand to the character of those making the proposal.” Very often, it focuses attention on the character of those who ACCEPT the argument. It becomes a boiling frog argument, in effect: these people won’t notice how accepting A will change their attitudes so that eventually they will accept B. Your general point basically stands because this is another way of shifting attention away from the strict merits of the proposal for A. Still, the fact that A will shift people’s attitudes is ONE feature of A, hence worth considering in considering the merits of A (possibly.)
But the big paradox of your post - I’m sure you’ve noticed this - is that your argument against slippery slope arguments IS a slippery slope argument. That is, you do not deny that sometimes it may be true that x puts us on a slippery slope to y. (And the costs of y may outweigh the benefits of x, and there may be no way of guaranteeing not ending up at y short of not getting to x.) You merely argue that, in general, accepting arguments of this form has a dynamtic tendency to put us on a slippery slope to polarization, partisanship, and hermeneutically suspicious sniffing about which is generally to be avoided in favor of above-the-board rational argument.
Strictly, there is no inconsistency here. Just as there is no strict inconsistency in someone from Crete announcing ‘most Cretans are liars’. But there is something oddly self-undermining about it. Not logically, but epistemologically. (In the case of the Cretan, if his claim is accepted, it follows that we have a reason not to trust his claim, other things being equal. Likewise in the case of your argument that accepting slippery slope arguments puts us on a slippery slope to bad things ... well, you do the math.)
Here is a similarly paradoxical norm that I happen to think has a certain heuristic validity: hermeneutically suspicious arguments should always be regarded with an extra dose of hermeneutics of suspicion, because their authors have a tendency to have bad motives.
Anyway, I think you might consider approaching your target from another angle. What is peculiar about slippery slope arguments is that they are akin to Platonic ‘noble lies’. You try to ‘trick’ people by taking a stance that A is wrong/bad, when really it’s all about B. (Scientists don’t make slippery slope arguments, and that is a kind of clue.) But this is complicated, too. For one thing, there is a class of arguments - at least in philosophy - that have the structure of slippery slope arguments but really aren’t. Arguments about when personhood begins. Arguments about when and where consciousness is present. You show someone that if they say (for example) functional capacity x is what makes for consciousness, then they are commited to the thermostat having some (low level) of consciousness. And that’s absurd. So, to keep off the slippery slope to panpsychism about thermostats, you don’t try to explain consciousness in terms of functional capacity x. This seems completely acceptable as an argument form. On the other hand, lots of such arguments seem like what Kant calls ‘paralogisms’ (or transcendental paralogisms.) That is, an abstract principle we accept seems somehow overapplied, with fallacious results. That is, these arguments often seem to go nowhere. (Entertaining as a hog on ice, as Tom Waits sings.) But now this comment has wandered far afield. So I think I’ll leave it at that.
Btw, when Tom Waits sings ‘entertaining as a hog on ice’, I always assumed we were supposed to imagine a big fat hog with its trotters churning, not getting anywhere. But suddenly it occurs to me we are probably supposed to imagine a pig carcase hanging from a hook, i.e. something very boring to watch. So ‘entertaining as a hog on ice’ means the same as ‘entertaining as watching paint dry’. When before I thought it meant: entertaining in a sort of low-level Schadenfreuden sort of way: joy in the inability of others to get anywhere.
But we need not be so extreme in our argument against slippery slope arguments. In many cases perhaps not; but mightn’t there be a case, on the grounds of something like ‘political pragmatism’, precisely for extremity of opposition? Govt proposes, opposition opposes with ferocity (invoking ‘slippery slope’), compromise is reached: practical politics.
It would go something like this: it’s only natural for (let’s say) Presidents of the USA to want to suspend habeus corpus, go beyond the law in obtaining intelligence and generally trample over the bill of rights in pursuit of their strategic political aims, for from their point of view these impedimenta are annoying rather than valuable. By ‘only natural’ I think I mean that every President since Lincoln has done something like this, even the liberal ones (FDR interning Japanese-Americans, or Johnson spying on anti Vietnam war protest groups etc.) Experience suggests that democratic governments will go as far as they can get away with in this sort of business (unlike dictatorships, which will go as far as they damn well please); but ‘as far as they can get away with’ is probably too far for most people’s comforts. So opposition to the Pres opposes all such infringements of the law, most likely by invoking a thin-end-of- wedge argument: suspend habeus corpus and it’ll be the slippery slope to a police state. These two opposed forces, as is the way of practical politics, get factored and averaged and the net result is a compromise, where some civil liberties get monkeyed around with, but others are let alone. (After all, FDR may have interned American citizens but he didn’t usher in a police state). Possibly not ideal, but surprisingly workable and effective, The political superstructure bends but does not break.
Btw, when Tom Waits sings ‘entertaining as a hog on ice’, I always assumed we were supposed to imagine a big fat hog with its trotters churning, not getting anywhere. But suddenly it occurs to me we are probably supposed to imagine a pig carcase hanging from a hook, i.e. something very boring to watch. So ‘entertaining as a hog on ice’ means the same as ‘entertaining as watching paint dry’. Eeuw! The comically-skating pig is charming and amusing, the pig-carcass creepy and morbid (rather than just ‘boring’): “As entertaining as watching paint dry on a wall painted with paint made from fresh human blood!” (’Liz-ten to ze children ov ze night wot be-oo-ti-ful music zey make ...’)
“If they say (for example) functional capacity x is what makes for consciousness, then they are commited to the thermostat having some (low level) of consciousness. And that’s absurd.” Is it absurd, though? I’ve never had a problem with the idea that a thermostat has consciousness, provided that we never forget that it’s only a really really low level of consciousness; one tiny piece from the enormous mosaic of eg human consciousness. That subroutine that prompts a heavy-smoker to light another cigarette without thinking consciously about it, or even really registering it, is ‘thermostat consciousness’ after all. Tho’ the smoker has many other subroutines, and the thermostat doesn’t.
You’re right, a bit off the point of John G’s original post though.
Come to think of it, a hog on ice webcam might be a real winner. So you’re a panpsychist, Adam. Well, some people are. Maybe it’s the true theory of the nature of consciousness.
...when Tom Waits sings ‘entertaining as a hog on ice’, I always assumed we were supposed to imagine a big fat hog with its trotters churning, not getting anywhere. But suddenly it occurs to me we are probably supposed to imagine a pig carcase hanging from a hook, i.e. something very boring to watch. So ‘entertaining as a hog on ice’ means the same as ‘entertaining as watching paint dry’.
Not to throw this thread further off course, but the actual lyric is “independent as a hog on ice.” Waits speaks to the philosophical problem of free will in a slaughterhouse, not the logical difficulties presented by the slippery slopes of National Socialists.
Actually, the best argument against allowing slippery slopes is that it starts innocently enough but invariably ends in obsession with bisexuality.
Thanks for the lyrics correction, Scott.
I can say categorically, without a scintilla of doubt, that your father did not invent the phrase “as helpless as a hog on ice” or, as is more commonly said, “as independent as a hog on ice.” Unfortunately, that’s just about the only thing that can be said about hogs and ice with any degree of certainty. But it’s not that folks haven’t been trying to track down the origin of this phrase. In fact, etymologist Charles Earle Funk titled his first book of word origins “A Hog on Ice” and his foreword to that book contains a seven page narrative of his quest for the roots of the phrase. ("A Hog on Ice” is currently available in a compilation of four of Funk’s books marketed under the title “2107 Curious Word Origins, Sayings & Expressions,” often found in the “bargain books” section of large bookstores.)
What we do know about “as independent as a hog on ice” is that it seems to have appeared in the mid-19th century, most likely in New England, although it is heard throughout the Northeastern and Midwest U.S. The precise meaning of the phrase isa bit unclear. It could simply mean “independent and ungovernable,” referring to the difficulty of recapturing a hog once it has managed to get out onto a frozen pond. Or it could refer, as your father’s version would indicate, to the fact that a hog in such circumstances is “independent” but also helplessly stranded, since hogs’ feet afford no traction on smooth surfaces. A hog on ice would have severe difficulty standing up, let alone walking.
There are other theories, such as the one tracing the phrase to the game of curling (sort of like bowling on ice) and a rather sardonic definition of “hog on ice” to mean “slaughtered,” but personally, I’ll go with the “free but helpless” interpretation. I feel that way myself a good deal of the time.
John: So you’re a panpsychist, Adam. Well, some people are. Maybe it’s the true theory of the nature of consciousness. Why do I get the impression that the last sentence there is followed by a silent ‘...and maybe ice-skating hogs will dance and slide out of my butt ...’?
I’m off to get myself a ‘Hi! I’m Adam! Ask me about today’s panpysche special!’ lapel badge.
Crucially, the slippery slope argument shifts the argument away from the merit of the proposal at hand to the character of those making the proposal.
Not at all.
It might be the case that those proposing a particular policy are being insincere, or have a more extreme agenda, but this is by no means necessarily the case. When the death penalty was abolished in the UK and Canada, concerns were raised that it might be the first step in a downgrading of punishment for murder. Abolitionists reassured the public that “life means life” and I’m sure they meant it. Unfortunately, those concerns have proven to be more than justified.
The slippery slope possibility doesn’t require deception or deviousness on the part of the policy proposer. Most probably they are sincere, in most cases. The point is that they simply don’t see the slope as a genuine possibility. They believe, as you seem to, that it will always be possible to stop the process at some point before the sliding goes too far. But history shows how bad we often are at predicting the consequences of our public policy decisions. The Volokhian mechanisms aim to explain why these things happen despite our good intentions
Concerns about slippery slopes is not necessarily a conservative position. I think it shares some rhetorical ground with “precautionary principle arguments” which are usually employed against scientific or technological innovations.
I don’t think it is generally true that “Crucially, the slippery slope argument shifts the argument away from the merit of the proposal at hand to the character of those making the proposal.” Very often, it focuses attention on the character of those who ACCEPT the argument. It becomes a boiling frog argument, in effect: these people won’t notice how accepting A will change their attitudes so that eventually they will accept B.
Shorter antirealist: I think what the SSA does is to remind us that we have less control over the consequences of our policy decisions than we think we do. It’s an exhortation to humility, like the precautionary principle.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that slippery slope arguments can almost always be countered with slippery slope arguments. In other words, whenever there is a decision to be made, the “slopes” fall away on all sides. So if the argument is that doing X puts one on a slippery slope to Y, the counter is that not doing X is a slippery slope to Z.
a-train, thanks for that fascinating linguistic factoid. A whole book, “A Hog On Ice”? Gotta get that one.
Adam, I don’t actually think that panpsychism is absurd. Well, no more absurd than any other theory about this stuff. Thomas Nagel has a paper, “Panpsychism” which basically argues: it is unreasonable to ignore this view (if I’m remembering right). Anyway, I agree. David Chalmers has a view with notably panpsychist implications, if I make no mistake. I find his views generally quite formidable, if not wholly agreeable.
The main danger in admitting panpsychism as a serious candidate is that it derails the usual analytic method of bartering and trading your intuitions. (Does it seem intuitive to you that your thermostat has consciousness - or that there is something it is LIKE to be your thermostat; that it has a protomind, in some robust sense? You are supposed to answer ‘no’.) I am inclined to conclude not that panpsychism is absurd - because it is wacky, relative to our intuitions - but that there is no reason to suppose our intuitions about the nature of mind have much of a purchase on reality. So I tend to feel that debates in the philosophy of mind are, as the cool kids say, independent as a hog on ice. That is, way too independent of any source of genuine traction to produce anything better than a somewhat ungainly structure churning atop the tiny trotters of its intuitions.
This is by no means a sufficient argument against all of contemporary philosophy of mind. It is not intended to be such. But it does express my feelings about it. Namely, I don’t really see much hope for progress. (But I am happy for those who feel differently to persist, and often I do end up finding their essays interesting.)
So go ahead: ‘ask me about panpsychism’ is a great lapel pin. Although: ‘ask me about solipsism’ has more irony value.
Thanks for all the responses--even for the piggish ones. I did wonder if I was making a slippery slope argment myself, but decided I wasn’t because I make a firm distinction between arguing the merits of the case and arguing that the case is never really just the case, but is always something more than the case, the camel’s nose in the tent. Can I maintain that distinction? Analytically, I think I can. In reality, given the facts of human psychology--habituation etc--that the commenters raise: I don’t know. So one part of me wants to accept the reasonable proposal (from antirealist) that SSAs are precautionary, are ways of keeping our eyes on those facts of human psychology. But another part of me wants to keep arguments “clean.” Of course, the world is messy. But we are in extra trouble when we allow our arguments to get messy as well. Clarity in thought is valuable precisely because clarity is so rare. And I still think SSAs are unclear in ways that cause more troubles than they solve.
Comments threads probably have a natural life span, and John McG has done such a nice job of rounding off our slippery swinish discussion that I feel churlish adding something more, especially since it’s not exactly relevant to the original post. Not exactly or, um, not at all.
It’s that, humble literary critic though I be (with, as Churchill might have said, much to be humble about), I’ve noticed something about the high-powered academic Philosophers of my acquaintance: that they’re much more comfortable with pigeonholing intellectual positions than not. Philosophy, after all, covers all sorts of fascinating questions; but when I chat about these things with my professional philosopher friends it’ll usually not be long before my interlocutor goes ‘ah! so you’re a Spinozist-Deleuze-Hegelian I see’ or ‘so you’re an quasi-anti-realist-presentist are you?’.
Is it naive of me to ask why labels are so popular in Philosophy? I’ve pondered several explanations: [1] comfort; [2] a means of putting-down uppity amateurs (’did you really imagine your puny cogitations haven’t already been worked over a thousand times by brains in-finitely su-perior to yours? bwahahaha!’)’ [3] professional shorthand that has become so endemic that it seems unavoidable. It’s probably also naive, or at least ill-mannered, of me to resent being labelled just a little bit. As it might be:
ME: Hi, how are you?
PHILOSOPHER: Hah! I see you adhere to the neo-Aristotelian approach to phatic conversation openings.
I don’t say this by way of taking a pop at John H. (’So, John, you are clearly a member of the Labelist school of thinkers’), so much as a genuine puzzlement on my behalf. But I’m often puzzled. Perhaps I’m a Puzzlist?
Pendant: one particular philosopher friend of mine from Cambridge, who’s now working for a London university college (not my one) told me about his first ever philosophy conference. At coffee another philosopher approached and asked ‘so, what do you work on?’ and my pal replied by trying to summarise the questions at the heart of his PhD. The other chap looked puzzled, and said, ‘do people really do that nowadays?’ ... by which he meant not ‘are those questions still current?’ but ‘do people really just, like, ask questions in philosophy?’ He was expecting the answer ‘I work on Wittgenstein’, or ‘I’m looking at Philosophy of Mind via Hegel’ or something like that.