Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [6]
This attention to the experience of being wrong resolves some potential objections to my everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to error. But two important things remain to be said about the scope and method of this project. And they are two important big things: one concerns morality and the other concerns truth. Take morality first. In daily life, we use “wrong” to refer to both error and iniquity: it is wrong to think that the earth is flat, and it is also wrong to push your little brother down the stairs. I’m concerned here only with the former kind of wrongness, but for several reasons, moral issues will be a constant presence in these pages.
One such reason is that moral and intellectual wrongness are connected not by mere linguistic coincidence but by a long history of associating error with evil—and, conversely, rightness with righteousness. (We’ll hear more about that history in the next chapter.) Another reason is that some of our most significant experiences of error involve reversing moral course. Sometimes, we conclude that we were wrong about the substance of our ethical convictions: that premarital sex actually isn’t morally abhorrent, say, or that vegetarianism isn’t morally requisite. At other times, we conclude that we were right about our ethics but wrong about the people or institutions we trusted to uphold them. Thus some Communists abandoned their faith in Stalin (but not in Communism) when he signed his nonaggression pact with Hitler, and some Catholics abandoned their church (but not its teachings) after revelations that it had sought to cover up widespread child abuse by priests. These experiences of being wrong about moral issues are distinct from the other errors in this book in content, but not in form. In every case, we place our faith in an idea (or a policy, or a person) only to realize, either by process or by crisis, that it has failed us.
A third reason morality will crop up in this book is that many moral wrongs are supported and legitimized by factual errors. To take an obvious example, consider phrenology, the now-discredited “science” of determining intelligence and personality through the shape of the skull. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, phrenology was used to defend discrimination against foreigners, Jews, Blacks, and other maligned minorities (to say nothing of women, that maligned majority). Here, as in so many cases, intellectual errors enabled moral wrongs. Of course, the opposite is true, too: preexisting prejudices shaped and sustained phrenology as much as phrenology shaped and sustained those prejudices. But that’s the point. Often, our beliefs about what is factually right and our beliefs about what is morally right are entirely inextricable.
There is one final way in which morality is relevant—central, in fact—to this book. This concerns the moral implications of wrongness itself. As I’ve already noted, the relationship we cultivate with error affects how we think about and treat our fellow human beings—and how we think about and treat our fellow human beings is the alpha and omega of ethics. Do we have an obligation to others to contemplate the possibility that we are wrong? What responsibility do we bear for the consequences of our mistakes? How should we behave toward people when we think that they are wrong? The writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch once observed that no system of ethics can be complete without a mechanism for bringing about moral change. We don’t usually think of mistakes as a means to an end, let alone a positive end—and yet, depending on how we answer these questions, error has the potential to be just such a mechanism. In other words, erring is not only (although it is sometimes) a