We tend to file forgetting under things that happen to us. You don't decide to forget a colleague's name or the errand you meant to run; it simply slips. On this picture forgetting is closer to digestion than to deliberation — a process the mind runs without consulting you. [This is placeholder essay text demonstrating the reading layout; replace with your own writing.]
But not all forgetting wears that face. Consider the things we arrange not to remember: the reminder we pointedly don't set, the unpleasant task we let drift, the habit of never writing certain things down. Here the forgetting is downstream of something that looks a lot like a choice.
Two senses of "letting slip"
It helps to separate the event from its history. The moment of forgetting is passive — there's no little act of erasure we perform. Yet the conditions under which we forget are often ones we shaped, sometimes deliberately. That gap is where questions of responsibility live.
If I could have remembered, and arranged my life so that I wouldn't, is the forgetting really something that merely befell me?
The law already half-believes the answer is no. We hold people accountable for foreseeable lapses — the parent, the pharmacist, the pilot — not because they chose to forget in the instant, but because they owned the upstream conditions and let them rot.
Where this goes next
If some forgetting is action-like in this attenuated sense, then a theory of responsibility owes us an account of derivative control: being answerable now for a state you set up earlier. That's the thread I want to pull, and it connects to work on prospective memory and self-regulation more directly than the tidy passive/active split suggests.
[Draft — comments welcome by email. This post is a placeholder to show how a finished entry reads in this template.]