The Ethics of Forgetting

We all know that remembering the important things is an important character virtue; it shows that you take those things seriously, and in the case of birthdays, anniversaries and such, that you take the relationship seriously and value the person in question. Certainly, anybody who has ever had their family fail to remember their birthday, or their significant other fail to remember the anniversary they share, knows that it’s a completely wretched feeling. You’d almost rather believe that they ARE doing it on purpose, since it’s easier to believe that somebody is angry at you than it is to believe that they think so little of you that they can’t even remember what day you started going out. And we all know that having a bad memory really won’t excuse such a mistake; this is why we have automatic reminders in our computer calendars, alarms on our PDAs and post-it notes stuck to the monitor of our computer. But what happens when, despite all of your best efforts, YOU are the poor schmuck who has forgotten the big day?

Depending on the nature of the event forgotten and the relationship you’re in, you might be able to use the Power of the Internet to pull yourself out of the pit you’ve constructed. Almost any conceivable gift item is available online, and with overnight shipping you can probably get it into your partner’s hands in 24 hours or less. If you don’t have that much time, you might be able to blame your Internet vendor, saying that you DID place your order well in advance of the event, only to have the shipment delayed by a backorder situation. If you are truly desperate, you can probably dig up something from around the house that might serve, although given the inherent problems with re-gifts (and unintentional re-gifts) this is generally not a good option. Some people will always try to keep a few potential gift items in “inventory” (somewhere around the house) against just such a failure of the memory, while others will resort to quickly creating a card that promises a vacation, tickets to a future event, or some product that isn’t yet available (but soon will be) to cover up the gap. Unfortunately, none of these concepts really addresses the inherent dishonesty of the situation…

The real question is whether you should be attempting to cover up the mistake in the first place. On the one hand, one of the best ways to resolve any situation is to make things right, and if you’ve injured someone by failing to get them a present then the logical thing to do is make good the lack. And certainly, telling someone that you were so overwhelmed by other events that you forgot the event (birthday, anniversary, holiday, whatever) is not likely to have any good outcome; you’re just likely to hurt their feelings to no good purpose. But on the other hand, failing to acknowledge your mistakes and taking furtive actions to cover up your failure is likely to cause trouble in the long run, especially if your counterpart finds out about your actions. In that event, you’re likely to be adding distrust onto whatever other problems you might be having…

All of which becomes much worse, of course, when the situation you are dealing with isn’t just forgetting the anniversary of your first Deeply Meaningful Telephone Conversation, but rather a major error of omission that has brought Federal auditors, customer lawsuits or tax liens down on your company. Which brings us to the point of this post: we all know that lying to Federal authorities (especially while under oath) is a felony, whereas maintaining a brutal degree of truth with your significant other will probably leave you alone even sooner than forgetting your anniversary. But where do you draw that line? At what point should you stop trying to just quietly fix your mistakes before anyone notices, and start holding press conferences announcing that errors have been made and you’re going to clean them up before they can have any negative impact on the American people. Or, to state it more plainly, when is honesty REALLY the best policy, and when would it be better to just try to make the situation go away?

It’s worth thinking about…