As someone generally hostile to slippery slope arguments (though less than I used to be) and someone who hasn’t devoted anywhere near the sort of attention or energy to stem cell issues that others around here have, I’d just like to offer a pet peeve about the left’s response to the issue.

Both sides of the ideological divide are inclined to slippery slope arguments. But it seems to me that when it comes to science the left is in particular prone to dystopian visions. Hollywood loves to churn out eugenic nightmare scenarios, science run amok, genetically engineered diseases coming back to haunt us, and the like. When it comes to bioengineered food, the environmental left is downright paranoid about stray seeds, wandering microbes, and escapee farmed fish. They stage protests in Haz-Mat suits at supermarkets that sell bio-engineered food and use outrageous rhetoric about human experimentation. There is a strong — but by no means defining — strain of rank Luddism on the Left. There’s one on the right too. But it’s very marginal and mostly atmospheric and Romantic. On the Left it has credibility thanks to people like Kirkpatrick Sale. And in unrelated fields, the pull of slippery slope arguments is profound. Across the liberal commentariat we’ve been hearing that recent anti-terror laws have repealed habeus corpus and for several years now, we’ve been told that every Bush policy pushes us closer to a totalitarian state. If something even remotely offends the self-esteem of a campus leftist you can be sure he’ll cry McCarthyism this way comes.

So how is it that people of this sort of mindset — or even liberals tolerant of people with this sort of mindset — can’t grant even the slightest intellectual benefit of the doubt to the anti-embryonic stem cell argument? I mean, is it really so crazy, so downright whacky, to imagine there’s a slippery slope issue in creating human life for the sole purpose of medical experimentation? I’m not 1,000% convinced by all the moral arguments opponents of embryonic stem cell research muster. But I’m at a loss as to how people who normally credit the most outlandish slippery slope arguments are willing to turn on a dime and declare anyone who has a problem with this sort of thing must be a religious nutcase.

Update: From a reader:

Jonah, I think you’re missing the real point of left support of ESCR: it would provide a terrific firewall for abortion when it has sufficient money going into it, and a nearly unbreachable one if it generates a big cure.

Me: Actually, I’ve long thought this is true. But, I was trying to make the point without providing my own answer for it. I think many, if not most, issues come in bundles in American politics, indeed in politics generally. People think in terms of slippery slopes so they think if we protect A, B and C, “they” will never get to X,Y and Z. I think in terms of strategy this is a legitimate and understandable approach but it often produces remarkable intellectual inconsistency — on both sides of numerous debates.