Is the slippery slope fallacy really a fallacy?

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I know it's widely regarded as a fallacy to bring up a slippery slope argument, but is it always a fallacy? I mean, take Apple's recent fight with the FBI, with the FBI demanding something that Tim Cook deemed a dangerous precedent. This is a good example of a slippery slope that is not a fallacy. Or the argument against outlawing hate speech which says that if you do outlaw hate speech, eventually other forms of hate speech will be outlawed as well. It's not a fallacy; it's true. The only slippery slope arguments I have heard that weren't valid were the ones regarding gay marriage. And even then, look at the history of gay marriage. Many times, gay rights have been justified by comparing them to black people's rights. So the gay rights movement was itself a slippery slope that came out of the civil rights movement of the sixties. But in this case it was a positive slippery slope. Some people say that the gay rights movement will lead to a rights movement for pedophiles. This would also be a positive change, and one that needs to happen, because the way we treat pedophiles now is not at all progressive. tl;dr I don't think the slippery slope argument is always a fallacy, because slippery slopes do happen in the real world.

Many fallacies do not automatically lead to faulty conclusions. Some simply suffer from logical inconsistencies which mean that they may not lead to correct conclusions.

Abductive reasoning, for instance, is a type of fallacious logical argument which nonetheless often leads to correct predictions.

Another more famous example is the Correlation proves causation fallacy. However, in many - perhaps even most - cases where people assume that a correlation is causal... they are probably right. These arguments usually only become problematic when dealing with more complex phenomena.

After all, tall primary school students generally have better math and reading skills than short primary school students.

I think that an important distinction needs to be made between the everyday sense of "fallacy" and the formal logical sense of "fallacy".

In everyday terms, "fallacy" is most often taken to mean that the conclusion isn't correct. But in terms of formal logic, a fallacy is when the conclusion cannot be formally "proved" from the initial arguments - it says nothing at all about whether the ultimate conclusion is correct or not, just that the reason for supporting the conclusion isn't sound. As soon as someone introduces other formal arguments to make their case, they are no longer committing the "slippery slope" fallacy, because the "slippery slope" is no longer their sole argument for expecting the outcome they are arguing for.

Probably the biggest problem here is that logical fallacies are exactly that - axioms of formal logic. People like to throw around accusations of making logical fallacies where it simply does not apply - e.g. the other person has simply stated an opinion, and is not even trying to argue it in terms of formal logic to begin with. In that case, it is not that the "fallacy" is incorrect, just a category error in applying the "you made a fallacy" argument where it does not belong.

The slippery slope is an analogy. As such, gratuitously assuming it's valid for a particular problem and then claiming to have proven that the problem works like a slippery slope is a fallacy. No more, no less. The same applies to any other analogy.

I don't think it's always a fallacy

If you give the Roman emperor the right to read everyone's mail that is a slippery slope

Pedophilia is not a good thing...for many reasons.

I'm not saying all pedophiles are bad people.

But the ACTS that pedophiliacs do to kids are frequently dangerous for the kids.

As a student / in training when I was younger I worked with them for a brief while and had to learn about them. And I've met more than one in my personal life. So I'll go ahead and say it:

All pedophiles are bad people.

In fact, in my opinion they are just a hair worse than run of the mill child molesters because they have been trying for almost 40 years to convince people that they are not harmful, that they are a valid "sexuality", that it's a "sexual preference" and so on. In reality, though, it's all just a carefully made construct. None of that is backed by actual (ie not psychology) science. They test out the same as molesters, they have the same power triggers, the same areas of the brains light up in a fMRI, etc. etc.