Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life

I forgot a close friend’s birthday last year. A few days after the fact, I realized that this important date had come and gone without my so much as sending a card or giving her a call. I was mortified. What kind of a friend could forget such a thing? Within minutes I was on the phone to her, acknowledging my fault and offering my apologies. But what, exactly, was the nature of my fault in this case? After all, I did not consciously choose to forget this special day or deliberately decide to ignore it. I did not intend to hurt my friend’s feelings or even foresee that my conduct would have this effect. I just forgot. It didn’t occur to me. I failed to notice. And yet, despite the apparent involuntariness of this failure, there was no doubt in either of our minds that I was, indeed, responsible for it. Although my friend was quick to pardon my thoughtlessness and to dismiss it as trivial and unimportant, the act of pardoning itself is simply a way of renouncing certain critical responses which it is acknowledged would, in principle, be justified. Moments such as these—which for many of us, I imagine, are more common than we would like to admit—reveal a deep tension in our ordinary thinking about the conditions of moral responsibility. If asked, most of us would probably say that choice or voluntary control is a precondition of legitimate moral assessment. And yet, as the case above was meant to illustrate, we regularly do hold ourselves and others responsible for things that do not appear to reflect a conscious choice or decision. Indeed, we quite often respond to people’s spontaneous at-