Spotted on the internet:
If a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never jump out… and die being boiled alive.
Empirically, this is not true: frogs have enough temperature sense to escape warming water, even though they’re cold-blooded. Rhetorically, it may also be true. It’s related to this:
Slippery Slope
If A happens, then by a gradual series of small steps through B, C,…, X, Y, eventually Z will happen, too.
Z should not happen.
Therefore, A should not happen, either.
We see slippery slope classified as a fallacy by those who need rigid definitions. However, technically speaking, it is not a fallacy — it’s misused frequently and the unwashed masses can’t tell the difference:
This type of argument is by no means invariably fallacious, but the strength of the argument is inversely proportional to the number of steps between A and Z, and directly proportional to the causal strength of the connections between adjacent steps.
I think such arguments appeal because we’re referring to a form of the Broken Windows theory: if we tolerate small acts of stupidity/evil, we will soon become accustomed to them as a form of background noise, and then not notice when we enter a phase of true horror:
Kant places particular emphasis upon human responsibility for both radical evil and moral conversion.
Unlike original sin, which Christian belief has understood as inherited, radical evil is self-incurred by each human being. It consists in a fundamental misdirection of our willing that corrupts our choice of action. In Kant’s terminology, it consists in an “inversion” of our “maxims,” which are the principles for action we pose to ourselves in making our choices.
Instead of making the rightness of actions — i.e., the categorical imperative — the fundamental principle for choice, we make the satisfaction of one of our own ends take priority in the willing of our actions. We thus inculcate in ourselves a propensity to make exceptions to the demand of the categorical imperative in circumstances when such an exception seems to be in our own favor.
Overcoming radical evil requires a “change of heart” — i.e., a reordering of our fundamental principle of choice — that we are each responsible for effecting in ourselves.
The real question of radical evil is: when an individual goes down a path to error, or a group does, how do they reverse themselves when they have come to tolerate the evil as “normal”?
In other words, if we slowly boil that frog/slip that slope by making competitive only the everyday actions that are radical evil, soon we radical evil is seen as normal, and defined as normal — and because that which opposes it also opposes the normal, any real “good” would be seen as evil.
Reminds me of Plato’s parable of the ring of the Lydian Gyges.
