A rchive Date
[ 08-04-2002 ]
Category
[ Philosophy ]
sub-Categoy
[ Epistemology ]
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[Beware: Slippery slope ahead
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
April 6, 2002, 11:36PM
In bioethics, according to Robin Henig, a science writer from Maryland: "A slippery slope implies a certain inevitability to scientific progress, an inability to put a stop to progressively more loathsome applications of knowledge once we receive knowledge in the first place. When did the term come into use, and what has it meant other than the way we use it today in bioethics?"
In politics: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in decrying the undemocratic methods of Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, said that the African nation was "on the slippery slope of perdition." (By using "of," he used perdition to mean "eternal damnation"; had he said "to," it would have meant "hell.")
Civil libertarians in the United States use the phrase, too: Otis Moss III, pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Augusta, Ga., warned that President Bush and his attorney general "stand upon a slippery moral slope as they attempt to respond to this horrific act (the 9/11 attacks) with legal procedures that shred the foundation of our Constitution."
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Before the phrase was extended into metaphor, it was used by poets who liked the alliteration to mean a muddy hill on which one could break one's neck.
Herman Melville in his 1876 Clarel: "The steeds withstand the slippery slope / While yet their outflung fore-feet grope."
And Robert Frost in 1916: "As standing in the river road, / He looked back up the slippery slope / (Two miles it was) to his abode."
But the key task of the phrase detective is to find earliest uses of the current sense of "a course that leads inexorably to disaster." One source tracks it to a 1951 novel, but new retrieval technology lets us do better than that.
Economist Herbert Heaton wrote in 1928 that Canadian "cards and bills alike found themselves on the steep slippery slope of war finance." And thanks to the Cornell Making of America database, we have this 1857 use from Chamber's Journal: "When the educated person of middle class is reduced to pennilessness ... what but this gives him the desire to struggle again up the slippery slope of fortune?"
In both citations, the meaning is closer to "the greasy pole," a figure of political speech popularized by Benjamin Disraeli to describe the difficult climb and easy fall from power.
The current sense of "first step in what will be a long slide" probably surfaced in the early 20th century, possibly in an article by a writer in a 1909 Quarterly Review from London: "the first step down that slippery slope at the bottom of which lies a parliamentary government for India."
Nowadays, as Henig notes, the phrase is often used in controversies about ethics. "It does not make sense to ban stem-cell research where abortion is completely legal and fertility clinics destroy untold embryos," wrote Marcel D'Eon in the Star Phoenix of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, last month. "And it demonstrates what opponents of abortion have been saying for more than 30 years: We are on a slippery slope. Who knows where it will lead?"
Logicians are very cautious about slippery slope arguments because it is impossible to know beforehand, with absolute deductive certainty, that an "if-then" statement is true.
President Eisenhower in 1954 came up with the "falling domino" principle: "You knocked over the first one, and what would happen to the last one was the certainty that it would go over very quickly." This "domino theory" was later much derided by opponents to our defense of South Vietnam.
Safire is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times. ]
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