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Expressing Gratitude as What’s Morally Expected: A Phenomenological Approach

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Abstract

This paper addresses an alleged paradox regarding gratitude—that a duty of gratitude is odd or puzzling if not paradoxical. The gist of our position is that in prototypical cases, gratitude expression falls under a distinctive deontic category we call morally expected—which has a corresponding contrary deontic category we call morally offensive. These categories, we maintain, need recognition in normative ethics to make proper sense of the moral status of gratitude expression and other morally charged restrictions on action, and likewise to make proper sense of the moral status of failures to abide by such restrictions. We argue for our view largely on phenomenological grounds.

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Notes

  1. On this puzzle, see Lyons 1969, Berger 1975, Weiss 1985, Card 1988, Wellman 1999, Manela 2015, and Martin 2019.

  2. See, e.g. McConnell 1993, ch. 2, Manela 2015.

  3. See, e.g. Wellman 1999, who argues there is no duty of gratitude and who thereby seems committed to this view, although he is not fully overt about gratitude expression being deontically purely optional. For a reply to Wellman (besides our own featured in this paper) see Carr 2013. See also Carr 2015 on whether gratitude (as a trait) is a virtue.

  4. Walker 1980–81 and McAleer 2012 recognize what the latter calls ‘propositional gratitude’—gratitude that, involving a two-place relation between a beneficiary and some welcome state of affairs. That the phenomenon in question is a genuine form of gratitude is challenged by Manela 2016a.

  5. For some empirical support for this claim see Lambert, et al. 2009.

  6. Cheshire Calhoun 2016 and Adrienne Martin 2019 defend views that recognize morally significant kinds of action (and omission) that are in some respects similar to our category of the morally expected. Calhoun argues that philosophical ethics should recognize what she calls “common decencies”—a category whose extension overlaps, if not coincides with, what we are calling the morally expected. Martin explores the nature of directed personal obligations, as for example between parents and their children, as a basis for understanding the relationship between a benefactor and their beneficiary. However, unlike us, Martin holds that there is an obligation of gratitude that is limited in scope in the sense that the benefactor has standing to direct the beneficiary to have the end of expressing gratitude, though no standing to direct the means of doing so. It seems to us that the direction in which Martin goes in attempting to accommodate the status of gratitude fits more comfortably with our proposal for recognizing the deontic category of the morally expected than it fits with her own proposal to expand the category of the obligatory. Exploring the similarities and differences between our view, Calhoun’s, and Martin’s is a topic for a separate paper.

  7. The categories of supererogation and suberogation are hybrid concepts, which include a deontic aspect and an evaluative/aretaic aspect. Supererogatory actions are deontically optional and praiseworthy to perform, while those who posit the suberogatory tend to understand it to be a hybrid category—blameworthy to perform yet having the deontic status of being purely optional. We too regard it as hybrid, although we also think that its deontic aspect is moral offensiveness. We’ll say more about the suberogatory in Sect. 6. But in any case, we have not included the categories of the supererogatory and the suberogatory in the diagram because we, like others who have deployed these categories, regard them as hybrid rather than as purely deontic. For a defense of the hybrid nature of these categories, see MacNamara 2011.

  8. We are using these labels for deontic categories, and for different kinds of reasons, in a narrow and mutually-exclusionary way, rather than widely. In a wider sense of ‘favoring’, any of these kinds of reasons for performing (not performing) A is a favoring reason for performing (not performing) A. And in wider senses of ‘expected’ and ‘offensive’, actions that are required are also expected, and actions that are wrong are also offensive.

  9. We use this term without intending any entailment of duty or obligation.

  10. For detailed discussions of the phenomenology of obligation (duty), see Horgan and Timmons 2005, 2008, and 2010a.

  11. Such positive affective experiences associated with expressing gratitude, including joy, are emphasized in Emmons 2007. However, as Manela 2016b points out, there can be cases involving negative feelings of gratitude.

  12. The experiential state-types we are here calling ‘seemings’ are distinct from the state-types we are calling experience-based judgments, even though such judgments often inherit their intentional content from the corresponding seemings. (This inheritance sometimes might be a causal relation between a token seeming and a token judgment; sometimes it might instead involve a single state-token that simultaneously tokens both the seeming-type and the judgment-type.) The Mueller Lyer illusion, for example, is a visual-experiential seeming as-of two horizontal lines being equal in length; but if one is aware of the illusory nature of this experience, one will refrain from judging that the lines are the same length. The reason we distinguish seemings from experience-based judgments will emerge in the paragraphs immediately below.

  13. Advocates of the view that gratitude expression is obligatory, insofar as they grant (as they typically do) that the benefactor has no right to demand compliance by the recipient, also face the highly non-trivial task of providing a moral-normative rationale for this lack of a correlative right to demand compliance. No such normative-ethical burden arises if, as we contend, gratitude expression normally is morally expected and hence not morally obligatory.

  14. Here we follow Driver’s 1992 influential discussion of the suberogatory.

  15. Even so, and as noted above in note 7, we agree with the standard claim that the suberogatory is a hybrid category, with evaluative and/or aretaic aspects in addition to its deontic aspect. In paradigmatic cases, for instance, the agent not only performs a morally offensive action, but also does so knowingly and willingly.

  16. For an overview of the work in question, see Davidson and Wood 2016.

  17. Gulliford and colleagues 2013 note an absence of attention by psychologists and philosophers on the intrinsic value of gratitude and speculate that it is because work on gratitude tends to suffer from ambiguity between instrumental and intrinsic justifications of gratitude.

  18. See the study by Algoe et al. 2008.

  19. For a study dissociating indebtedness (duty) from gratitude see, for example, Watkins, et al. 2006.

  20. Algoe borrows the distinction from Clark and Mills 1993, 2001 whose exchange/community distinction between relationships concerns benefits conferred, where the basic contrast is exemplified by e.g. business relationships (exchange) and relationships where “benefits are given without the donor or the recipient feeling the recipient has an obligation to repay” (2001:3). As they write, the norms governing communal relationships are such that the donor “can’t demand” the sort of responsiveness from the recipient as one can within exchange relationships (Ibid, our emphasis).

  21. We are grateful to Robert Audi, Keith Lehrer, Michael McKenna, Robert Wallace, and anonymous referees for this journal for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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  1. University of Arizona, Tucson, United States

    Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons

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Horgan, T., Timmons, M. Expressing Gratitude as What’s Morally Expected: A Phenomenological Approach. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 25, 139–155 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10261-w

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