The first question concerns the stakes of our mistakes. The difference between being wrong about your car keys and being wrong about weapons of mass destruction is the difference between “oops” and a global military crisis—consequences so dramatically dissimilar that we might reasonably wonder if the errors that led to them can have anything in common. The second question is whether we can be wrong, in any meaningful sense, about personal beliefs. It’s a long way from the Mets to the moral status of abortion, and some readers will suspect that the conceptual distance between being wrong about
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