Casual logicians often parrot the assertion that "Slippery Slope" is a logical fallacy. It must be... they read it on the Internet. However, repeating what you've read doesn't substitute for thought and proper application, and a Slippery Slope is only a logical fallacy under specific circumstances; those being when the conclusion doesn't follow from the facts. As a fallacy, I'd say it's a special case of non-sequitur (disguised by a series of weak links instead of an immediately stated conclusion that doesn't fit the facts).
At other times, it's no fallacy at all; and that's when the chain of events to the conclusion do follow from the premise... and moreso, when the conclusion is actually demonstrated.
"If we allow gay marriage, the next thing we know, people will want to marry their dogs, or their cats, or what about their pigs?"
The problem here is that those -- exactly -- do in fact happen. Here's one website that describes twelve cases: marriage to dogs, cats, horses, cows, goats, a dolphin, and even frogs. You can google more on your own.
Those who employ this particular example are engaging in a more egregious example of their own: the "Suppressed Evidence" fallacy. Because the hard evidence doesn't support their own conclusions, they simply choose to pretend that it doesn't exist. They reject objective reality and substitute their own.
This segues nicely into the topic of dysphoria, which takes us to this article in the National Post:
Here we have examples of people who now claim to be "trans-abled"; and who then have elective surgery performed, or mutilate their own bodies, to better fit their self-image of being disabled... lame, blind, etc.
This is a type of delusion: somatic, which is a delusion that the person has some physical defect or general medical condition.
Other examples are those of people who claim to be trans-species, or trans-age.
To be clear, such people are mentally ill. Keep in mind that calling this a "delusion" has nothing to do with fear or hatred. There is no emotion in the recognition of facts. A delusion is readily defined: As phrased by Wikipedia, "a delusion is a mistaken belief that is held with strong conviction even when presented with superior evidence to the contrary."
Superior evidence could include the following:
You have a full set of working limbs; therefore you are not a paraplegic.
You are a human, right down to the DNA; therefore you are not a cat.
You have an X and a Y chromosome; therefore you are not a woman.
Delusions are often harmless. A person with delusional disorder can be high-functioning; holding down a job, paying bills, socializing normally (except for their sometimes quirky idosyncracies). They shouldn't persecuted, because persecuting someone makes you a dick. But being free from persecution doesn't mean they're not still delusional. Nor does it mean that it is "the right thing" to force other, non-delusional, people to enable their dysfunction. I'd say "the right thing" is self-evident: to help them over their difficulties, if possible.
No, I'm not a psychiatrist. You don't have to be a psychiatrist to recognize dysfunction when you see it, or to employ logic, or to to recognize the difference between a person's claims about their "identity" and the overwhelming physical evidence to the contrary. And as psychiatrists go, I think you'd have to be a pretty damned poor one to ignore that evidence yourself. And let's look at those claims, please... although every strand of DNA in a body shows the person to be one thing, this is discarded in favor of a pattern of behavior. Get that? Rather than conclude that the pattern of behavior is the issue, the conclusion is that every cell of every organ in the body is wrong. That's not even rational.
And while there are cases where hormonal imbalances exist, and other organs play a part; the conclusion drawn by enablist psychiatry is that the behavior is the deciding factor. Once this decision is made even once, and because the initial step itself ignores overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it's not possible to justify a distinction between one kind of dysphoria (which is "ok") and other kinds (that are not). Hence, the slippery slope is real, and we do see people marrying their pets, and we do see people cutting off their limbs, and we do see medical professionals who stepped onto that slope not merely rationalizing mutilation and bestiality; but performing mutilations themselves; and we do see people who want this "normalized".
A "Slippery Slope" is not a fallacy when it's the news.
My favorite author of all time is Hans Christian Andersen (and it pained me to see "The Little Mermaid" bastardized by Disney).
As evidence of his prophetic genius, I present for your consideration "The Emperor's New Clothes", a story of a multitude of "wise" people who proclaimed the existence of things not in evidence and spouted utter bullshit in the face of plain and obvious truths, simply because it served their vanity to do so.
And though these views were popularly accepted by an easily manipulated public, eventually a younger generation saw the truth... that despite the impassioned claims of those who thought themselves enlightened and learned, there was in fact nothing there.
I leave it to you to ponder the applicability of this morality tale.
Except he didn't. What Bill Nye did is tilt with a few carefully chosen strawman caricatures of anti-abortion arguments. Here's the video that Uproxx references:
To be fair, when dealing with controversial issues, a lot of the "information" that's communicated is simply through slogans and signs. It's a problem that's magnified by a desire on the one side to try to get the most message into the fewest words; and a lack of desire on the other side to listen any more closely than that. So caricatured arguments are often self-constructing. But let's see where Nye goes wrong, shall we?
The first strawman is right there in the title, bold type: that anti-abortionists want to tell women what to do with their bodies. Their bodies are not the issue. It is the bodies of the beings dependent upon them that are. More on that later.
The second is Nye's observation that "many, many, many, many more hundreds of eggs are fertilized than become humans." That may be, but it's completely irrelevant. This is descriptive of a natural process, and none of those eggs are the subject of abortion. Not one. And as such, they're not the subject of anti-abortionists arguments, either. Nye is just engaging in some obfuscation, hoping that you won't notice that he's completely talking past the issue to focus attention on a non-sequitur. But hey, he gets to get all "sciencey" and "educational", as if you didn't know all about the birds and the bees already. Basically, he's also using the opportunity to be condescending to those who already not only know the facts of life, but assume that their opponents do, too, without the need for remedial instruction.
He then takes this into an attempt at reductio ad absurdum by questioning "who are you going to sue?" over the eggs that aren't implanted in the uterine wall. As if you had to sue over a natural process. As if natural processes are someone's fault. Of course, this is a starting assumption worthy of any liberal who is engaging in "low effort thinking" about a subject, which is exactly what Nye encourages here. He most certainly is not using science. Rather, it's less-than-stellar barracks lawyering. And even there, it's a reflection of a deep legalistic lack of understanding. Natural processes... what a court calls "acts of god"... are nobody's fault. Not everyone who's born lives to old age either. They succumb to all sorts of calamities, from lightning strikes to heart attacks to cancer and liver disease. This natural rate of attrition doesn't keep us from making laws against deliberate murder. Nye is simply using an emotionally-charged legal fallacy to try to make you feel silly, and winds up making himself look ignorant in the process. It's safe to say that he "apparently literally" doesn't know what he's talking about.
He then uses the phrase "women's rights with respect to their reproduction", which completely dismisses any rights that may be held by men in respect to their reproduction. It's plainly sexist. It does take two to tango, and no amount of equity is achieved with placing all authority with one group, and all blame with the other. It's one of the things he should have paid a little more attention to in his remedial sex ed. Surely an enlightened individual would recognize that shared responsibility must be accompanied by shared rights.
Nye then goes beyond sexism and straight into racism. Hey, why not? The race card is a liberal staple. "A lot of men of European descent" is a dressing-up of our old standby, "old white men". And in Nye's world they're passing laws based on ignorance. But as we've seen Nye is already proving himself to be highly ignorant (or at least "ignoring") of the oppositions actual arguments. Maybe he's got something there... he's an old white guy. If people took his advice literally, they'd dismiss his arguments, too. The thing is, the "old white guy" canard is another irrelevancy. People elect representatives, and polls of women show them to be as divided about abortion themselves. But Nye ignores these facts to tilt with a racial strawman. This isn't science, either. It's poor rhetoric.
From here it's a sloppy segue into an argument against the Bible. This particular strawman is the assumption that anti-abortionist reasoning is rooted in the Bible alone. In fact, atheists and agnostics, as well as non-Christian theists are also divided as to the subject of abortion, and many theists hold secular reasoning for their pro-life views as strongly as their religious beliefs. Their opposition to abortion is held independently of their religion. But religion is a convenient scapegoat. If you can argue with "a" religious view, you can stretch it, insisting it is shared by all those who are religious, and you don't have to bother with pesky issues.
At this point in the video it's clear that Nye really isn't speaking to convince anyone to join his side. He may actually believe he is, but he's not arguing as if he were actually doing anything more than cheering on the home team. Certainly, if one is going to use the Bible to speak with Christians, one will want to have a passing familiarity with at least the parts pertinent to what one is saying. Nye, on the other hand, speaks as if he is totally ignorant. He states that the Bible teaches that sex always results in children (ignoring high-profile cases of barren women, including those who later have children, such as Sarah, the wife of Abraham). This is an attempt to make Christians feel silly and stupid. More accurately, his argument instructs atheistic liberals to believe that Christians hold such beliefs and are therefore silly and stupid. It actually makes Christians -- who know the Bible better than he -- believe that Nye himself is biblically illiterate. Nye says, "That’s wrong, and so to pass laws based upon that belief is inconsistent with nature." Laws that are consistent with nature would recognize this: pregnancy doesn't result every time you have sex, but you have to be impressively ignorant to miss the fact that pregnancy can happen any time you have sex, even if you don't like the guy. Or girl. Bill Nye is denying the science.
It is certainly ironic that Nye casts people as scientifically illiterate when discussing science, and then personally proceeds to screw up the science and display actual illiteracy when discussing a book.
His next statement, "It’s hard not to get frustrated with this, everybody. Nobody likes abortion, okay. But you can’t tell somebody what to do," rises to the level of hypocrisy. Nye has no problem whatsoever telling somebody what to do when it's for other causes that he feels are important, even when it's based on shaky science and revisionist data. These are the "more important things" referred to by Nye. These are the things that trump nascent human life.
Nye then proceeds to pretend that science is an exclusively anti-religious affair. "You wouldn’t know how big a human egg was if it weren’t for microscopes, if it weren’t for scientists, medical researchers looking diligently." But the father of microbiology, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, was a Calvinist. From his Wikipedia article, "He often referred with reverence to the wonders God designed in making creatures great and small. He believed that his amazing discoveries were merely further proof of the great wonder of God's creation." Look up the references yourself. Genetics was pioneered by a monk, Johann Gregor Mendel. The Calculus was devised by the devout though unorthodox Isaac Newton. Kepler determined the orbits of the planets through a dogged determination to find out the truth of God's creation. It was a Catholic priest named Georges Lemaitre, not Steven Hawking, who proposed the Big Bang. If it weren't for these and other religious gentlemen and their reverence what they referred to as "the Book of Nature", then you wouldn't have science at all, much less sanctimonious condescending atheists who erroneously claim science as their own exclusive domain. It is only in recent years that the idea has been incubated that science and religion are mutually exclusive. And though this nonsense has been swallowed by many atheists and theists alike, it is by no means true.
Nye closes with this: "Just really be objective about this. We have other problems to solve everybody. Come on. Come on. Let’s work together." Duplicity abounds. If Nye were objective, then he wouldn't cling to the fiction that this nascent life, small and dependent as it may be, is "the mother's body". A genetic lab in a blind test will confirm that these are not the same individual. Objectively... scientifically... it is a life of its own, genetically distinct from the mother, and is by no means "her body". Obviously, to a "pro-life" adherent, life takes precedence. It's right there in the name. IF these other things are so much more important in Nye's estimation, and he himself claims they are, then it is he who should back off of the issue, and work on those other problems instead.
So, did Bill Nye use science to debunk the logic of anti-abortion legislation? No, he used strawmen, distraction, condescension, fear-mongering, false appeal to authority, mis-characterization, misrepresentation, belittling, and emotional cajoling. In short, everything but science.
