Alex Spiegel of NPR’s Morning Edition reported this morning on a psychology study that examined inattentional blindness: the way people fail to see things that are directly in front of them because they are focused on something else or because they cannot process the new information.

This research suggests the importance of ethical decision making as a process that demands consideration of all available inputs: our brains may well filter out important information if we don’t direct our focus in the proper way.  As the story suggests, we are no less responsible for the information just because it got “filtered out.”