Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [7]
This sketch of the relationship between moral wrongness and error brings us almost to the end of our definitional quagmire. But I confess I have saved the swampiest step for last. This is the truth question: whether “right” and “wrong” reflect the real state of the world or are simply subjective human designations. The conundrum of whether truth exists, how we can arrive at it, and who gets to adjudicate it has preoccupied some of the best thinkers of every culture and era since time immemorial. This obsession has yielded tremendous intellectual and artistic returns, but very little that could truly be called progress, let alone resolution. Safe to say, then, that we aren’t going to get to the bottom of these issues here. But we can’t just ignore them, either. Socrates was right: no theory of error can exist entirely outside a theory of truth.
It’s easy to spot the theory of truth implicit in the traditional philosophical definition of wrongness. If we believe that error involves taking something false to be true, then we are also signing on to a belief in truth. In other words, this definition of wrongness assumes the existence of absolute rightness—a fixed and knowable reality against which our mistakes can be measured. Sometimes, that assumption serves us well. There are, after all, plenty of broadly accepted standards of truth; even a committed relativist will likely concede that we can be just plain wrong about, say, the outcome of an election or the paternity of a child. The trouble with this definition is that the opposite is true, too. Even a committed realist will concede that there are many situations where an absolute standard of truth is unavailable. And yet, confronted with such situations, we often continue to act as if right and wrong are the relevant yardsticks.
Take the issue of aesthetics. We all know that matters of taste are different from matters of fact—that standards of right and wrong apply to facts but not to preferences. Indeed, we are somehow able to sort this out very early in life. Even young children understand that it’s not okay if you think the sky is blue and I think the sky is green, but totally okay if your favorite color is blue and my favorite color is green. Yet it is comically easy to find examples of full-grown adults acting like their own taste is the gospel truth. Mac fanatics are famous for treating PC users like the victims of a mass delusion. People who swoon over hardwood floors regard wall-to-wall carpeting in Victorian homes as objectively appalling. Neighbors fulminate—or litigate—over one another’s exterior paint colors or inflatable lawn ornaments. It is barely an exaggeration to say that I once almost broke up with someone over the question of whether rhubarb pie qualifies as a great dessert (obviously not) and whether The Corrections qualifies as a great novel (obviously so).
Granted, most of us are a bit wry about our tendency to treat our own predilections as the transcendent truth. Still, knowing that this behavior is ridiculous seldom stops us from engaging in it. The late novelist and critic John Updike once noted that the trouble with writing book reviews is that it is “almost impossible to…avoid the tone of being wonderfully right.” The same goes for our informal reviews of almost everything. It’s as if I believe, in some deep-down part of myself, that rhubarb pie radiates a kind of universal ickiness, while The Corrections, in some intrinsic way, just is brilliant. (And you, my rhubarb pie loving reader, are marveling at how wrong I am.) It follows, then, that anyone sufficiently perceptive and intelligent would respond to these things—to everything—the same way I do.
If this is how we act when we know that right and wrong are irrelevant, you can imagine what happens when there really is a fact of the matter, whether or not we ourselves can ever arrive at it. Forget, for a moment, the obvious but treacherous