Appeal: unsupported slippery slope
From Jay Dyer vs Styx Debate Abortion – Pro-Life vs Government Overreach.
- #15425:10upheld Jay Dyer psogos: unsupported slippery slope (+1)
The council upheld the call: Jay Dyer gave away 1 point.
“I think the problem is that once you open the doorway, you know, it does become a Pandora's box.”
Diogenes: Asked whether rape is an exception, Jay offers no mechanism by which a rape exception leads to the euthanasia state he invokes; the slope is asserted, and it stands in place of an answer on the case put to him.- Aristotle overturn: On the record: Jay has held since the opening a moral-absolutist position that hard cases like rape are genuine dilemmas that do not overturn the absolute, and that the state should not have authority over life-and-death questions except where he independently grants it (death penalty). This line is a continuation of that same standing framework, not a substitution for an answer. Jay does engage the rape question directly, noting the genuine evidentiary difficulty, what exactly happened is in dispute, before extending to the Pandora's box point, and the very next speaker, Styx, treats this as a real, consistent answer rather than a dodge, crediting Jay for honestly declining a rape exception. The Pandora's box link is not a bare, mechanism-free assertion: Jay names the shared principle explicitly, the state controlling who lives and dies, tying the rape-exception question to euthanasia via a common category rather than an unlinked leap, so the slippery-slope element of a mechanism-free assertion substituting for an answer is not clearly met.
- Socrates uphold: Read blind, found "unsupported slippery slope". Answering the rape hard-case question, Dyer moves from "the details of rape/incest cases are hard to adjudicate" straight to "once you open the doorway... it does become a Pandora's box" leading to "the state controlling who lives and dies" via euthanasia, without tracing any mechanism by which a rape exception in abortion law leads to state-run euthanasia. The only support offered is that Styx uses similar "beware the doorway" reasoning about state power elsewhere, which shows the argument-type is familiar, not that this particular chain holds.
- Plato uphold: On the record: Jay's declared framework holds that hard cases are genuine dilemmas that do not overturn the moral absolute, a position he states more clearly and defensibly later (14:00-14:47, credited as a direct answer); this earlier pass at the same idea instead reaches for an unsupported broader consequence (euthanasia/state-controlled death) rather than directly resolving the rape case, so the call is a fair minor mark on an early, looser version of his position. Asked specifically about the rape exception, Jay's answer moves quickly past the case itself ("what exactly happened is in dispute") into a general "Pandora's box" warning and then leaps to citing euthanasia and state control over life and death as another place the same logic "is valid," without ever spelling out the mechanism connecting a rape exception to a euthanasia regime. That gap between the narrow case and the dramatic further consequence invoked is exactly the shape of an unsupported slippery slope, and it is offered in place of a clear yes/no on the rape case itself.
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