Inapt gratitude: against expansionist views

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.

How weird is the development of children’s gratitude in the United States? Cross-cultural comparisons.

“…As Navarro and Tudge (2020) pointed out, it is “the willingness to take on an obligation to reciprocate to our benefactors, without thinking that we will gain something as a result, which is the essence of gratitude as a moral virtue” (p. 83). It involves more than feeling a positive emotion when gaining some benefit (McConnell, 1993, 2020; Merçon-Vargas et al, 2018a; Tudge et al, 2021); such a position ignores some of the concept’s complexity. We recognize that although many gratitude scholars accept the relevance of an intentional benefactor, our definition adds something novel—the desire to reciprocate—that may not be readily endorsed.…”

Exploring intergenerational differences in the virtue of appreciation at the workplace

“…Targeted gratitude or triadic gratitude is about one person being grateful to the other. And generalized or propositional or dyadic gratitude involves gratefulness for the state of affairs (Manela, 2016;McConnell, 2020). Manela (2019) further noted that appreciation is a response to the beneficial or valuable states of affairs constituted by cognitive elements.…”

Using cultural‐ecological theory to construct a mid‐range theory for the development of gratitude as a virtue

“…Some complexities need to be considered (McConnell, 1993(McConnell, , 2020. Was the benefactor acting for the right reasons?…”

“…Perhaps it is less a question of defying description, but rather that developmentalists and family scientists have paid far less attention to questions of definition than have philosophers (see Gulliford et al, 2013). This means that they have drawn no distinction among gratitude, appreciation, and happiness (Adler & Fagley, 2005; Carr, 2013; Fagley, 2016; Fagley & Adler, 2012; Freitas et al, 2021; Manela, 2016; McConnell, 2020). Fincham and Beach (2013) called for more precision in terminology: “it behooves scholars to specify clearly the referent for the use of the term gratitude and its synonyms” (p. 640).…”