# Slippery slope

*Also called: Camel's nose, domino fallacy*

- **Cluster:** False choices and ranges — Options and spectrums squeezed out of shape
- **Page:** https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/slippery-slope/
- **In Arabic:** https://fallacy.wiki/ar/fallacy/slippery-slope.md
- **Licence:** CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

## What it is

Claiming one small step must lead to an extreme outcome, without defending the links.

## In the wild

> Allow remote Fridays and no one will ever come in again.

## How to answer it

Ask for the probability of each link in the chain, then multiply them.

## Origin and naming

The image is classical: Cicero has Laelius warn that affairs, once started, glide readily down the path of ruin. In modern logic Alfred Sidgwick described it in 1910 as the 'thin end of a wedge' objection, and English-language debate has kept the slope picture ever since — lawyers prefer a 'parade of horribles', politicians a 'camel's nose in the tent'.

## More places it shows up

- If we let the intern present to the client today, next year interns will be running whole accounts.
- If the city approves one food truck on this street, the block will turn into a permanent market.
- Let them move one deadline and soon no date in the calendar will mean anything.
- Allow one chart to skip review and the whole data culture collapses into guesswork.

## How to spot it

- The argument jumps from the first step to the last without ever pricing the middle steps.
- Each 'and then' is treated as obvious; nobody says how probable any link actually is.
- The endpoint is much scarier than the proposal on the table, which is the point of choosing it.

## Nearby

- [Appeal to fear](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/fear.md)
- [Continuum fallacy](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/continuum.md)
- [Fallacy of the single cause](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/single-cause.md)

## Read more

- [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope)
- [The Fallacy Files](http://www.fallacyfiles.org/slipslop.html)

---

From fallacy.wiki — a bilingual field guide to 91 logical fallacies, published by phi holdings. Licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): reuse freely with attribution to fallacy.wiki.