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Is gratitude a moral virtue?

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Abstract

One matter upon which the already voluminous philosophical and psychological literature on the topic seems to be agreed is that gratitude is a psychologically and socially beneficial human quality of some moral significance. Further to this, gratitude seems to be widely regarded by positive psychologists and virtue ethicists as a moral virtue. This paper, however, sets out to show that such claims and assumptions about the moral character of gratitude are questionable and that its status as a moral virtue is by no means straightforward.

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Correspondence to David Carr.

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Carr, D. Is gratitude a moral virtue?. Philos Stud 172, 1475–1484 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0360-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0360-6

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