Part I will deal with the backward-looking kind of responsibility for acts in the past. Part II will then examine the forward-looking kind, most associated with roles. Let us recall the paradigmatic situation of the child spilling the milk. The mother enters the room, sees the milk, and instantly knows what happened in the past, and also knows that the child did it. She holds him responsible. And yet this way of phrasing it is ambiguous, for it suggests that she saw the situation and then held him responsible. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that she saw his responsibility directly within the situation. Indeed, although the spilling took place in the past, and the spilt milk and overturned cup are here in the present, there is a sense in which the spilling itself is still “in” the spilt milk and overturned cup, here in the present. This might sound odd, so in the first section of this chapter I need to say more about the general notion of the past being in the present, and about what it means for human beings to live in time. This background will turn out to be essential for understanding the nature of retrospective responsibility, which I will then attempt to define in the second section.