Logical Fallacies VI - The Slippery Slope

In a Pay to Play Law Blog response to my recent blog post on a discussion that had appeared in the Pay to Play Law Blog, the argument is made that pay-to-play laws that go beyond disclosure, such as prohibiting campaign contributions from government contractors, set up a slippery slope toward the undermining of constitutional rights and toward higher compliance costs by law-abiding companies. This argument turns out to be a logical fallacy, which allows me to get back to a series of posts on logical fallacies used in local government situations, which I abandoned a couple of years ago.

Here is the quote from the January 21 Pay to Play Law Blog post:

As many jurisdictions have already learned, once one embarks down the path of prohibiting contributions by corporations and their “agents”, one has placed one’s hind-quarters squarely on the proverbial slippery slope. To prevent circumvention of a law by those few bad actors determined to gain an advantage, one must legislate prohibitions against otherwise lawful conduct by a vast array of potential agents (directors, directors’ spouses, relatives, domestic partners, etc). As states such as Colorado have learned, to cast a net wide enough to prevent circumvention one often does so at the expense of the constitutional rights of innocent parties and always at the expense of lawful businesses who simply want to follow the law.

The slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy, because it is based on the assumption that we cannot stop, that each new situation will not be evaluated anew and decided on its merits. Even when the person making the argument can point to a situation where things went "too far," his argument assumes that others will do the same and cannot learn from the problems arising elsewhere. It is, therefore, also an argument against experimenting with reasonable policies in different jurisdictions to see what actually will happen.

It is true that no government ethics rule will totally prevent circumvention. But all government ethics professionals can accept this fact. One reason is that they understand that government ethics rules are minimal in nature. That is, ethics rules are the least that is expected from government officials and those doing business with government.

Another reason that government ethics professionals can accept that there will be circumvention is that they are very used to not getting what they want. Rather than living on a slippery slope heading inevitably downward, they tend to live in a hole where their ethics program and their funding are in constant jeopardy. Then suddenly there is a big scandal (usually not a government ethics scandal), and suddenly a pile of earth lands in their hole, and they are on a bit higher ground. It is never as high ground as everyone says it is, of course, but you work with what you have and ask for more.

In other words, the slippery slope is not the reality of the government ethics world. It is a logical fallacy borrowed from such arguments as those over euthanasia, abortion, drugs, and gun control.

Here are my other posts on the use of logical fallacies in local government:
The Ad Hominem Attack
The Ad Populum Defense
The Straw Man Wears Camouflage
Begging the Question and Appeals to Emotion
Accusations of Hypocrisy or Inconsistency

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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