Inadvertent actions in relation to legal and moral responsibility have been represented as puzzling on many occasions. In this chapter, I aim to show they are puzzling for different reasons than those usually proposed. Before I do this it is important to clarify some assumptions and presuppositions. First, the chapter presupposes that intentional action constitutes the paradigm of action . Second, it presupposes that intention and intentional actions run parallel to practical reason, and that the first-person perspective is the primary perspective to explain intentional action. Inadvertent actions seem to be an important challenge to this conception and this study aims to pave the way for thinking about negligence in the context of the first-person perspective. The aim of the chapter is modest in the sense that it neither offers an account of negligence, nor a criticism of the views that have been advanced in the literature, but identifies a puzzle that arises in the context of actions from the first-person perspective and gestures towards a possible methodology for thinking about negligent actions. I see this as a necessary and preliminary task before engaging with the nature of negligent acts and responsibility for negligence.

Under the pressures of sociocultural self-regulation, the projective and autobiographical sense of a virtual and displaced self develops initially in a public format that emulates and internalizes an outside perspective, that of an external observer, under publicly shared concepts and terms. Section 7.1 elaborates the notion of a public construction of an autobiographical sense of me-self. Section 7.2 examines the perspectival mechanisms, mainly mental imagery and narrativity, that internalize a regulatorily external observer angle on one’s self-strategizing. Finally, according to Section 7.3, self-strategizing would not be adaptive and effective, and the other requirements (examined in this and the previous chapter) would not be met, unless the reflective mind is also able to represent its own states and attitudes in the same public concepts and terms in which it represents the states and attitudes of other minds, which is another facet of an initially internalized public regulation of one’s self-strategic mind.