Commentary
Alfred Sedgwick, an obscure English philosopher and logician who died in 1943 at the age of 93, is usually credited with the development of the slippery slope argument. The argument is used to predict, with little or no evidence, that the doing of an act might lead to, or result in, a chain of undesirable, even disastrous, outcomes.
Sedgwick’s slippery slope argument is relevant in the context of the banning of single-use plastic bags from Australia’s stores. South Australia was the first Australian jurisdiction to ban these bags in 2009, followed by the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) in 2011. New South Wales was the last jurisdiction to ban single-use plastic shopping bags on June 1, 2022….