Perspectives on Gratitude by Carr David;

Author:Carr, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4392025
Publisher: Routledge

Counter-arguments

So far I have claimed that people commonly feel gratitude toward non-agents and that a variety of moral reasons argue in favor of those feelings. Some might want to reject these claims or argue that these claims are insufficient to show that gratitude toward things is virtuous.

Gratitude as an interpersonal relationship

First, some might believe that gratitude describes an interpersonal relationship. If this were true, gratitude toward pets might still be possible, but similar feelings we might have toward trees, mountains, trains, body parts, and other things would have to be categorized as some sentiment other than gratitude. Although people may report feeling gratitude toward things, their use of the term would be considered mistaken.

I find this counter-argument unconvincing. First, this move would require us to judge widespread common usage of the term mistaken, and the case for dong this looks weak. Some people do feel what they call gratitude toward things. Besides clashing with the linguistic intuitions of some professional philosophers, it is unclear why this poses any problem. Indeed, the arguments of the previous section suggest that there are a variety of moral reasons that support the practice. Claiming that a widespread linguistic practice ought to be changed requires significant reasons. Claiming that a widespread linguistic practice with significant intrinsic and instrumental benefits ought to be changed requires even more significant reasons. When philosophers describe their own linguistic intuitions about what gratitude means, they are not providing reasons that rise to this challenge.

Second, despite the fact that contemporary philosophical analyses exclude most cases of gratitude toward non-agents, there is one important class of exceptions – gratitude toward previous agents. If we focus on gratitude requiring a favor or benefit provided with the right attitude, it remains possible to feel gratitude toward someone who has lost their agency through illness, or someone who has passed away. Moreover, these feelings of gratitude need not be mere memories of the gratitude we felt when the individual possessed agency. I feel gratitude toward my father, but he passed away a couple of years ago. Sometimes this gratitude is similar to the feelings that I had when he was alive, but my feelings of gratitude have grown and deepened since his death. As I raise my own children, I appreciate more of what he did. I can reflect on his circumstances and see how they were, in many ways, more difficult than my own. So, when I feel gratitude to my father it is more than merely remembering the feelings that I had when he was alive. Sometimes the feelings refer to something new and at other times the quality of the feelings has evolved.

For those who believe in a life after death similar to the life we know, gratitude toward those who have passed is unproblematic. In such cases, gratitude toward the dead is still gratitude toward a moral agent. But many people do not believe in an afterlife, and of those who do, many don’t believe it will be a continuation of the same identity and agency we had before we died.

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