Inapt gratitude: against expansionist views
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Inapt gratitude: against expansionist views Terrance McConnell
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Psychologists and philosophers have written much about gratitude recently. Many of these contributions have endorsed expansionist views of gratitude, counseling agents to feel and express gratitude in many circumstances. I argue that the essential features of the moral norm of gratitude are that a beneficiary acknowledges and appreciates benefits provided by another who is acting from beneficence, and is disposed to provide a comparable benefit to the benefactor if a suitable occasion arises. The best-known philosophical version of expansionist views claims that gratitude is apt even in cases where the “benefactor” not only did not intend to benefit the other, but intended to harm her. In the psychological literature, expansionists typically do distinguish between being grateful to and being grateful that. But they also write as if there is one general character trait of gratefulness. In this paper I argue that the philosophical position considered is mistaken on conceptual and moral grounds, and that the dominant view among psychologists fails to recognize the difference between two different traits of gratitude, one a moral virtue and the other a prudential virtue. Keywords Gratitude · Obligations · Virtue · p-gratefulness · t-gratefulness
In the last two decades there has been a revival in the study of gratitude, due in large part to the contributions of positive and developmental psychologists. Gratitude is praised for contributing to subjective well-being, various aspects of physical health, as a coping strategy in times of dire straits, promoting optimism, and many other good things. Gratitude enthusiasts have found many things and many occasions for T. McConnell () Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27402-6170, USA E-Mail: [email protected]
T. McConnell
which people are advised to be grateful. In the philosophical literature, gratitude is principally understood as a moral norm (an obligation and/or a virtue). This paper argues that there is a downside to this enthusiasm. The problem is not that there is too much gratitude, but rather finding gratitude everywhere obscures its real moral value, unless careful distinctions are maintained.
1 Preliminaries There is a basic distinction between two types of gratitude: grateful to and grateful that (Walker 1981; Card 1988). The former may be designated as P1 is grateful to P2 for benefit B; the latter, as P3 is grateful for state of affairs X. When one person is grateful to another, this has been called ‘benefit-triggered’, ‘targeted’, or ‘triadic’ gratitude; being grateful for a state of affairs has been labeled ‘generalized’, ‘propositional’, or ‘dyadic’ gratitude (Lambert et al. 2009; McAleer 2012; Gulliford et al. 2013; Manela 2016a) (In this essay, I will use the terms ‘targeted’ and ‘propositional’.). Examples of targeted gratitude include that I am grateful to Jane for giving me a ride home from work, that I am
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