Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Responsibility for forgetting

  • Published:
Philosophical Studies Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies to measure judgments of responsibility for the consequences of forgetfulness. Our results show that we are disposed to hold others responsible for some of their forgetfulness. The level of stress that the forgetful agent is under modulates judgments of responsibility, though the level of care that the agent exhibits toward performing the forgotten action does not. We argue that this result has important implications for a long-running debate about the nature of responsible agency.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Brett, in interviews, never explained why he forgot; but oftentimes when caregivers forget children in cars, there is a familiar pattern of events that occur. The caregiver is normally breaking a habit or routine in taking the child in the car, and usually the caregiver is rushing off to work. See Amaya (2013) for more discussion of these patterns that underlie everyday cases of slips and forgetting.

  2. It is an open question whether care is just one kind of valuative state relevant to responsible agency or whether care is equivalent to the whole class of valuative states relative to responsible agency. Some philosophers disagree about the nature of caring itself. For instance, is caring just the relation of desire (as in Arpaly and Schroeder 2014)? Or is caring a more complex, interconnected group of dispositions to be in certain emotional states and exhibit certain patterns of attentional focus (as in Jaworska 1999)? There are other issues (raised in Darwall 2002; Frankfurt 1999; Sripada 2016), but we set those aside because substantive disputes about the nature of caring are orthogonal to the present discussion.

  3. Sripada (2015: 261) provides a case called Mrs. Smith—Forgets: “Mrs. Smith is playing cards with her friends and someone happens to mention today’s date. Unfortunately, this doesn’t trigger Mrs. Smith’s remembering that it is her grandson’s birthday. As a result, she does not give him a call even though she has done this is year’s past. Billy is sad.” Sripada continues with his own diagnosis of the case, claiming: “Mrs. Smith—Forgets is, I believe, a case where the ability to express one’s self over a suitably wide range of cases is preserved, but the manifestation of the ability in the actual circumstances is compromised; that is, her self fails to be expressed in what she does in the actual situation. Moreover, I believe that intuitively she is not morally responsible for her forgetting Billy’s birthday.” In the terminology of this paper, Sripada concedes that Mrs. Smith fulfills the capacitarian conditions on responsibility (having the ability to express herself), but she fails to express herself in forgetting (thereby not fulfilling a certain version of the valuationist theory of responsible agency).

  4. There are two dimensions along which this issue gets complicated. The first has to do with the relationship between false belief, credence, and fragmented belief (e.g., do I have a false belief with respect to your foot if I have a credence of .12 that your foot occupies the part of the subway car on which I’m about to step?). Second, do mistakes ever involve culpable false belief? Suppose that there is such a thing as culpable belief (another complicated issue). If I believe (falsely) that your foot is part of the subway car, and I am culpable for believing falsely, then do I still make a mistake in stepping on your foot? Thankfully, we can sidestep these complications in our discussion.

  5. This picture is complicated by the fact that absence of care does not always mitigate. This is because sometimes, an agent may occupy a role or be under an obligation that requires her to have certain cares. In these cases, the valuationist would not predict that absence of care results in reduced responsibility (e.g., a parent is not excused for neglecting her kids simply because she doesn’t care about them). We have chosen vignettes that do not run into this complication. That is, in the vignettes we present below, it is not the case that the agent is required to care to some degree about the action that he forgets to perform (it is the case that the agent is required to do the action, but this does not entail that the agent must care about the action).

  6. These fitting affective responses will sometimes have a distinctively negative valence (as in cases of negative stress), though we leave open the possibility of positive stress, so that fitting affective responses require the agent’s coming to be in some positively valenced affective state. See Maxwell and Racine (2012) for more on the idea that stress requires some affective component.

  7. For example, if someone is stressed about an upcoming performance, the cause of the stress might be, in part, the fact that one is unsure about how the performance will go and the fact that one is incapable of resolving this uncertainty until the event occurs. The role of uncertainty in stress matches Reynolds, Owens, and Rubenstein’s (2012) definition of stress as a psychological state grounded in uncertainty about fulfilling certain duties or roles.

  8. Further issues about the scope of stress are discussed in Sect. 5.2.

  9. In the HCLS and LCHS vignettes, we substituted the appropriate care or stress element into the same spot in the vignette to maintain relative symmetry between the vignettes.

References

  • Ahrens, M. (2016). Home fires involving cooking equipment. Quincy, MA: NFPA Fire Analysis and Research.

    Google Scholar 

  • Amaya, S. (2013). Slips. Noûs, 47(3), 559–576.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Amaya, S., & Doris, J. (2014). No excuses: Performance mistakes in morality. In J. Clausen & N. Levy (Eds.), Handbook of neuroethics (pp. 253–272). Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arnsten, A. F. T. (2015). Stress weakens prefrontal networks: Molecular insults to higher cognition. Nature Neuroscience, 18(10), 1376–1385.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arpaly, N., & Schroeder, T. (2014). In praise of desire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Björnsson, G. (2017). Explaining away epistemic skepticism about culpability. In D. Shoemaker (Ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility (Vol. 4, pp. 141–164). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clarke, R. (2014). Omissions: Responsibility, agency, and metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Clarke, R. (2016). Ignorance, revision, and commonsense. In P. Robichaud & J. W. Wieland (Eds.), Responsibility: The epistemic condition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Collins, J. (2006). Crime and parenthood: The uneasy case for prosecuting negligent parents. Northwestern University Law Review, 100(2), 807–855.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cushman, F. (2008). Crime and punishment: Distinguishing the roles of causal and intentional analyses in moral judgment. Cognition, 108, 353–380.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cushman, F., Dreber, A., Wang, Y., & Costa, J. (2009). Accidental outcomes guide punishment in a ‘trembling hand’ game. PLoS ONE, 4(8), e6699.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Darwall, S. (2002). Welfare and rational care. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • De Freitas, J., Sarkissian, H., Newman, G.E., Grossman, I., De Brigard, F., Luco, A., et al. (2017). Consistent belief in a good true self in misanthropes and three independent cultures. Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12505.

  • Decety, J., & Cacioppo, S. (2012). The speed of morality: A high-density electrical neuroimaging study. Journal of Neurophysiology, 108, 3068–3072.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Doris, J. (2015). Talking to Our Selves. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Finkel, N. J., & Groscup, J. L. (1997). When mistakes happen: Commonsense rules of culpability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 3(1), 65–125.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fischer, J. M., & Ravizza, M. (1998). Responsibility and control. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Frankfurt, H.G. (1971). Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person. Journal of Philosophy, 68(1), 5–20.

  • Frankfurt, H. G. (1983). What we are morally responsible for. In L. Cauman, I. Levi, C. Parsons, & R. Schwartz (Eds.), How many questions? Essays in honor of Sidney morgenbesser (pp. 321–335). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Frankfurt, H. G. (1999). Autonomy, necessity, and love. In Necessity, volition, and love (pp. 129–141). New York: Cambridge University Press.

  • Goldfarb, E. V., Froböse, M. I., Cools, R., & Phelps, E. A. (2017). Stress and cognitive flexibility: Cortisol increases are associated with enhanced updating and impaired switching. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 29(1), 14–24.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Guerrero, A. A. (2007). Don’t know, don’t kill: Moral ignorance, culpability, and caution. Philosophical Studies, 136, 59–97.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harman, E. (2011). Does moral ignorance exculpate? Ratio, 24, 443–468.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hart, H. L. A. (1968). Punishment and responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hieronymi, P. (2008). Responsibility for believing. Synthese, 161(3), 357–373.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hollon, N. G., Burgeno, L. M., & Phillips, P. E. M. (2015). Stress effects on the nueral substrates of motivated behavior. Nature Neuroscience, 18(10), 1405–1412.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hurd, H., & Moore, M. (2011). Punishing the Awkward, the stupid, the weak, and the selfish: The culpability of negligence. Criminal Law and Philosophy, 5(2), 147–198.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Husak, D. (2011). Negligence, belief, blame and criminal liability: The special case of forgetting. Criminal Law and Philosophy, 5(2), 199–218.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jaworska, A. (1999). Respecting the margins of agency: Alzheimer’s patients and the capacity to value. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 28, 105–138.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Keegan, H. (2016). The 8 most costly cooking mistakes in Springfield—and how they could’ve been avoided. Springfield News-Leader, published online 19 Dec 2016. http://www.news-leader.com/story/news/local/ozarks/2016/12/19/8-most-costly-cooking-mistakes-springfield-and-how-they-couldve-been-avoided/94730926/.

  • Killen, M., Mulvey, K. L., Richardson, C., Jampol, N., & Woodward, A. (2011). The accidental transgressor: Morally-relevant theory of mind. Cognition, 119, 197–215.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Levy, N. (2009). Culpable ignorance and moral responsibility. Ethics, 119, 729–741.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Malle, B. F., Guglielmo, S., & Monroe, A. E. (2012). A theory of blame. Psychological Inquiry, 25(2), 147–186.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Martin, J. W., & Cushman, F. (2016). Why we forgive what can’t be controlled. Cognition, 147, 133–143.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mason, E. (2015). Moral ignorance and blameworthiness. Philosophical Studies, 172, 3037–3057.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maxwell, B., & Racine, E. (2012). Does neuroscience research on early stress justify responsive childcare? Examining interwoven epistemological and ethical challenges. Neuroethics, 5(2), 159–172.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McEwen, B. S., Bowles, N. P., Gray, J. D., Hill, M. N., Hunter, R. G., Karatsoreos, I. N., et al. (2015). Mechanisms of stress in the brain. Nature Neuroscience, 18(10), 1353–1363.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McGeer, V., & Pettit, P. (2015). The hard problem of responsibility. In D. Shoemaker (Ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility (Vol. 3, pp. 160–188). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Mele, A. (2006). Practical mistakes and intentional actions. American Philosophical Quarterly, 43(3), 249–260.

    Google Scholar 

  • Murray, S. (2017). Responsibility and Vigilance. Philosophical Studies, 174(2), 507–527.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nelkin, D. K. (2009). Responsibility, rational abilities, and two kinds of fairness arguments. Philosophical Explorations, 12(2), 151–165.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pelletiere, N. (2016). ‘Forgotten Baby Syndrome’: A parent’s nightmare of hot car death. ABC News, published online 14 July 2016. http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/forgotten-baby-syndrome-parents-nightmare-hot-car-death/story?id=40431117.

  • Raz, J. (2011). From normativity to responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Reynolds, S. J., Owens, B. P., & Rubenstein, A. L. (2012). Moral stress: Considering the nature and effects of managerial moral uncertainty. Journal of Business Ethics, 106(4), 491–502.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rosen, G. (2015). The alethic conception of moral responsibility. In R. Clarke, M. McKenna, & A. Smith (Eds.), New essays on moral responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sapolsky, R. M. (2015). Stress and the brain: Individual variability and the inverted-U. Nature Neuroscience, 18(10), 1344–1346.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scult, M. A. (2017). Flexible adaptation of brain networks during stress. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(15), 3992–3994.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shoemaker, D. (2011). Attributability, answerability, and accountability: Toward a wider theory of moral responsibility. Ethics, 121(3), 602–632.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shoemaker, D. (2015). Responsibility from the margins. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, H. M. (1983). Culpable ignorance. Philosophical Review, 94(4), 543–571.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, A. M. (2005). Responsibility for attitudes: Activity and passivity in mental life. Ethics, 115(2), 236–271.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, A. M. (2008). Control, responsibility, and moral assessment. Philosophical Studies, 138(3), 367–392.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sripada, C. (2015). Moral responsibility, reasons, and the self. In D. Shoemaker (Ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility (Vol. 3, pp. 242–264). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Sripada, C. (2016). Self-expression: A deep self theory of moral responsibility. Philosophical Studies, 173, 1203–1232.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Strawson, P. F. (2003). Freedom and Resentment. In G. Watson (Ed.), Free will (pp. 72–93). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Timpe, K. (2011). Tracing and the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility. The Modern Schoolman, 88(1–2), 5–28.

  • van Inwagen, P. (1978). Ability and Responsibility. Philosophical Review, 87(2), 201–224.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van Inwagen, P. (2008). How to Think about the Problem of Free Will. Journal of Ethics, 12, 327–341.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van Inwagen, P. (2017). The problem of Fr** W*ll. In Thinking about free will (pp. 192–209). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Vargas, M. (2013). Building better beings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Watson, G. (1975). Free Agency. Journal of Philosophy, 72(8), 205–220.

  • Watson, G. (1987). Responsibility and the limits of evil: Variations on a strawsonian theme. In F. D. Schoeman (Ed.), Responsibility, character and the emotions (pp. 256–286). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Watson, G. (1996). Two faces of responsibility. Philosophical Issues, 24(2), 227–248.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weingarten, G. (2009). Fatal distraction. The Washington Post, 08 Mar 2009. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html.

  • Wolf, S. (1990). Freedom within Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Woolfolk, R. L., Doris, J. M., & Darley, J. M. (2006). Identification, situational constraint, and social cognition: Studies in the attribution of moral responsibility. Cognition, 100, 283–291.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yaffe, G. (2012). Intoxication, recklessness and negligence. Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, 9, 545–583.

    Google Scholar 

  • Young, L., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., & Saxe, R. (2007). The neural basis of the interaction between theory of mind and moral judgment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104, 8325–8340.

    Google Scholar 

  • Young, L., Nichols, S., & Saxe, R. (2010). Investigating the neural and cognitive basis of moral luck: It’s not what you do but what you know. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1, 333–349.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Young, L., & Tsoi, L. (2013). When mental states matter, when they don’t, and what that means for morality. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(8), 585–604.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sara Johnson for help with some of the statistical analysis. Also, thanks to Manuel Vargas, Santiago Amaya, Dylan Murray, and Paul Henne for discussion of various points in the paper. Members of MADLab and the Imagination and Modal Cognition lab at Duke University gave critical feedback on the vignettes and analysis of initial results (especially Aaron Ancell, Jesse Summers, Jana Shaich Borg, Luka Ruzic, and Bryce Gessell). This project was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Felipe De Brigard and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and a grant from the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control project at Florida State University to Samuel Murray. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation, Florida State University, or the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control project.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, USA

    Samuel Murray

  2. Institute for Applied Research and Youth Development, Department of Child Study and Human Development, Tufts University, Medford, USA

    Elise D. Murray

  3. Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab, Duke University, Durham, USA

    Gregory Stewart

  4. Department of Philosophy, Duke University, Durham, USA

    Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & Felipe De Brigard

  5. Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University, Durham, USA

    Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

  6. Duke Institute for Brain Science, Duke University, Durham, USA

    Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & Felipe De Brigard

  7. School of Law, Duke University, Durham, USA

    Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

  8. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, USA

    Felipe De Brigard

  9. Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, USA

    Felipe De Brigard

Authors
  1. Samuel Murray
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Elise D. Murray
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Gregory Stewart
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Felipe De Brigard
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Samuel Murray.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Murray, S., Murray, E.D., Stewart, G. et al. Responsibility for forgetting. Philos Stud 176, 1177–1201 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1053-3

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1053-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation