Why is the Slippery Slope fallacy a fallacy?
One of the criticisms I received was that the slippery slope fallacy was not really a fallacy in this case. In fact, I was challenged to explain why the slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy. Frankly, I was a little shocked at this demand. When I wrote this page, it had not occurred to me that some people would lack an intuitive understanding of what makes the slippery slope fallacy a fallacy- call it “overestimating your audience.” Therefore, allow me to explain: the slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy because it assumes the existence of intermediate causal connections between the events in a sequence. By stating that you cannot commit action A because it will inevitably lead to events B, which will in turn lead to event C and so on, the slippery slope fallacy makes the assumption that action A will directly cause event B to occur. It compounds this with the assumption that event B will cause event C to occur, and so on. If all of these causal connections don’t exist, then it is fallaci
