Slippery Slope

I was having a conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago about slippery slopes. He was saying that the "slippery slope" argument is often overused and keeps people from compromising. His thesis was that people don't want to give even a little bit from their position because they are afraid that the new position will be chipped at too, until they have lost everything.

What he was saying made sense to me at the time (especially since we were eating at a really good Indian restaurant and that generally makes me agreable).

But then I saw this article (through QandO). Apparently, there was an editorial in the British Medical Journal that called for banning the sale of long, pointy kitchen knives. This has been around the blogosphere and back already, so I'm not going to comment much on that. (Although, next they are going to want to ban all arms... and legs, so that no one can hurt anyone else. I'll be here all week.)

This article made me think about the slippery slope conversation.

I think now that the problem isn't that people rely on the "slippery slope" argument but rather that it is a valid observation. People never argue from a situation in the past, they argue from the current position.

Put another way, let's say there is a scale from 1 to 10 where 1 is one extreme position and 10 is the other extreme postion. The current policy/law/social placement is at 9.

People say, let's compromise. The position shifts to a 7.

Then when the topic comes up again, they say "7 is way to high, let's compromise to 5", completely forgetting that 7 was a compromise.

Then when the topic comes up again, they say "5 is way to high, let's compromise to 3", completely forgetting that 5 was a compromise.

The same thing happens again until it's at a 2 or a 1.

The way to shift a population is little by little, compromise by compromise.

A very easy example is dress lengths in America. At one time it was risque for a woman to show her ankles. You know where I'm going with that... I'm not going to type it.

My point is that I think the "slippery slope" is real.

mwz