Gratitude, Self-Interest, and Love

Abstract

Gratitude is usually conceived as a uniquely appropriate response to goodwill. A grateful person is bound to reward an act of goodwill in some appropriately proportionate way. I argue that goodwill, when interpreted as love, should require no reward. Consequently, the idea of gratitude as a proportionate response to love is not intelligible. However, goodwill can also be understood merely as a disinterested concern. Such forms of goodwill are involved in reciprocal relationships. But gratitude has no place in these relationships either. © 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Motivating propositional gratitude

“…Hence, they simply pluck some standard definition out of the air and posit that as the characterisation of 'the concept of gratitude'' (Kristjánsson 2015: 503). My aim here is to present an account of gratitude in which every aspect is 5 To get a sense of the debate and its history see for instance Seneca (2001Seneca ( , 2006, Aquinas (1964), Hobbes (1998), Kant (1967Kant ( , 2000, Nietzsche (1994), Paley (1822), Hewitt (1924), Stout (1927), Lyons (1969), Strawson (1974), Berger (1975, Simmons (1979), Walker (1981Walker ( , 1988Walker ( , 1989, Klosko (1989Klosko ( , 1991, Swinburne (1989), McConnell (1993, Wellman (1999), Knowles (2002), Von Tevenar (2006), Carr (2013Carr ( , 2016, Gulliford et al (2013), Shaw (2013), Berkovski (2014), Roberts (2014) and Kristjánsson (2015).…”