by Laura Lee Winger

Created on: August 04, 2009   Last Updated: August 05, 2009

The idea of being right is a broad concept. Answering a math question correctly in school is very different than doing the morally right thing in a personal dilemma. The conception of "right" becomes even foggier when you get into discussions of beliefs, as in politics and religion.

There is a lot to be said about being right, and whether or not you can ever truly be right, and even more so if your being right necessarily makes disagreeing parties wrong. We take a lot of ideas for granted as absolute, simply because it is too much to consider everything subjective.

For example, I have a blue shirt on. Few people would argue with me, unless they chose to simply clarify the exact shade of blue I was wearing. But it's only blue in the context of what we understand as blue; that is, we compare it to other things we have been told are blue, and our brains compute the likeness and assess if the shirt is blue by our definition. If a child is raised with their definitions blue and yellow reversed, then he would tell me my shirt is yellow, just as yellow as all the other things I know as blue around him.

The blue shirt example may be a bit arbitrary and silly, but it illustrates my next point which is more relevant. People perceive their environment and events differently, so a person disagreeing with you may not necessarily be incorrect based on their perception, just incorrect based on your perception and perhaps whatever evidence is available. Conversely, you could be sure you witnessed something, but be contradicted by other witnesses or subjective evidence, Especially as time passes, our memories can change subconsciously. Our mind takes shortcuts to be more efficient, and sometimes those shortcuts can alter what we think or remember. This can sometimes account for a testimony to change from the original report, although certainly not always.

Sometimes arguments or discussions will come down to differences in beliefs, and it can be very difficult or impossible to come to an agreement at that point, hence the cliche, "agree to disagree". The thing to keep in mind as discussions wind down to this point is that, like a person learned blue to be yellow and vice versa, they are only wrong by your standards and beliefs, and that this does not necessarily make them wrong. This gets into a little bit of ethics and philosophy theory, but the idea is that you can only judge people by their own morals, values and learnings.

Doing the right thing is also

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