Robert Roberts - The Moral Psychology of Gratitude

Series Editor: Mark Alfano, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Delft University of Technology

How do our emotions influence our other mental states (perceptions, beliefs, motivations, intentions) and our behavior? How are they influenced by our other mental states, our environments, and our cultures? What is the moral value of a particular emotion in a particular context? This series explores the causes, consequences, and value of the emotions from an interdisciplinary perspective. Emotions are diverse, with components at various levels (biological, neural, psychological, social), so each book in this series is devoted to a distinct emotion. This focus allows the author and reader to delve into a specific mental state, rather than trying to sum up emotions en masse. Authors approach a particular emotion from their own disciplinary angle (e.g., conceptual analysis, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, phenomenology, social psychology, personality psychology, neuroscience) while connecting with other fields. In so doing, they build a mosaic for each emotion, evaluating both its nature and its moral properties.

The Moral Psychology of Contempt,
edited by Michelle Mason

The Moral Psychology of Compassion,
edited by Justin Caouette and Carolyn Price

The Moral Psychology of Disgust,
edited by Nina Strohminger and Victor Kumar

The Moral Psychology of Regret,
edited by Anna Gotlib

The Moral Psychology of Admiration,
edited by Alfred Archer and Andr Grahle

The Moral Psychology of Guilt,
edited by Corey J. Maley and Bradford Cokelet

The Moral Psychology of Hope,
edited by Claudia Blser and Titus Stahl

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Selection and editorial matter 2019 by Robert Roberts and Daniel Telech

Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors.

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Edited volumes, like many other projects that depend on the generosity, trust, and patience of others, are customarily preceded by words of thanks. This volume on gratitude is no exception.

We thank Mark Alfano for his attentiveness and encouragement throughout the editorial process. From suggesting possible authors to improve the breadth of the volume to ideas about acquiring funding in order to workshop the chapter drafts, Mark was generous with his advice and general support. A better series editor is difficult to imagine.

Mark suggested that we submit an application to the Templeton Foundation to fund the workshop, and their generous response enabled us to host a very fruitful meeting in the fall of 2017. They responded with an outright gift, obviating a detailed budget and expense reports. The Templeton Foundations kind support enabled us to hold a three-day pre-read workshop at the University of Chicago that brought the volume contributors, as well as some local scholars, into conversation with one another while the contributors worked on their drafts.

We thank Isobel Cowper Coles and Natalie Linh Bolderston at Rowman & Littlefield International for their patient and highly professional support.

Thanks also to the participants of the gratitude workshop at the University of Chicago: Jack Bauer, Agnes Callard, David Carr, Sophie-Grace Chappell, Justin Coates, Cameron Fenton, Liz Gulliford, Bennett Helm, Christina Karns, Brian Leiter, Hichem Naar, Tony Manela, Terrance McConnell, Coleen Macnamara, Adrienne Martin, Colin Shanahan, Stephen White, Marya Schechtman, and Will Small.

Daniel would like to thank Agnes Callard, Brian Leiter, and Paul Russell for their mentorship in thinking about gratitude (and praise-manifesting attitudes generally), and Robert Roberts for showing him the ropes of volume editing and teaching him much about gratitude and philosophy in the process. Bob Roberts would like to thank Daniel Telech for doing most of the work for this volume, including securing our authors, applying for funding for the workshop, and organizing and hosting the workshop.

Robert Roberts and Daniel Telech

Gratitude is a response to anothers goodness. Paradigmatically, one is grateful to another for some benefit. That is, in feeling grateful, you typically construe yourself or someone you care about as a beneficiary and the otherthe person to whom you are gratefulas a benefactor. But gratitude represents the benefactor as more than a supplier of benefits. It is a response not simply to beneficence but also to benevolencegoodwill. Natural events and malicious persons both may cause some end of mine to be fulfilled, and I may be glad that the beneficial state of affairs came to be, but such good fortune doesnt usually dispose me to feel grateful to anyone. This is plausibly because I do not take these benefits to be expressions of benevolence, or goodwill. The claim that gratitude construes another to have acted from goodwill is a mainstay in philosophical discussion of gratitude (e.g., Berger 1975: 299300; Camenisch 1981; McConnell 1993; Roberts 2004). Gratitude is thus an interpersonal or social emotion.

We hasten to note a usage of the word gratitude that does not pick out an inherently interpersonal response; for example, I am grateful that I got to see a shooting star. This sense of gratitude, sometimes called propositional gratitude (McAleer 2012), involves a relation between a person and a state of affairs, without reference to a benefactor. But little seems to be lost by redescribing instances of so-called propositional gratitude as cases of appreciation (cf. Carr 2013; Roberts 2015; Manela 2016). Whether or not propositional gratitude is gratitude only in name, this volume is about the social and agent-directed emotion that involves a triadic relation between two agents and (typically) an action, as expressed by the following kind of sentence: Abe is grateful to Miranda for helping him move into his new apartment.

Gratitude has been studied in various aspects. It has been theorized not only as a positive emotion (alongside joy and admiration), but as both a virtue and a grounding kind of