Moral Agency and Responsibility in Autobiographical Remembering

This essay focusses on occurrent voluntary autobiographical remembering. (1) Broad evidence is reviewed for personal level construction and agency in producing the content, form and tone of what people recall in episodic remembering and autobiographical narratives. People are also often able to
choose how to remember autobiographically and to change the content and attitudes of such memories. In addition to such causal agency, it is argued that, especially where one can monitor and change such content, one is responsible for it. (2) Ethical and moral agency are differentiated, and both are argued to be a matter of degree and to be socially embedded and modulated. Unlike other
approaches, this essay focusses on ethical and moral agency in producing the content of autobiographical remembering itself. (3) Illustrations of such remembering, drawn mostly from fiction, plausibly suggest that people often exercise significant degrees of ethical and/or moral agency in autobiographical remembering and bear responsibility for those aspects of recalled content. (4)
Consideration of reconciliation and forgiveness corroborates people’s ability, particularly in joint reminiscence, to choose how to remember autobiographically and to change the ethical content and attitudes of such memories. Some questions raised by these proposals are indicated.