Abstract
The paper argues that ‘All varieties of gratitude are only overall fitting when targeted towards agents,’ for instance that any variety of gratitude for the beautiful sunset is only overall fitting if a supernatural agent such as God exists. The first premise is that ‘Prepositional gratitude is overall fitting only when targeted towards agents.’ For this premise, intuitive judgments are offered. The second premise is that ‘Prepositional gratitude is the paradigmatic variety of gratitude.’ For this premise, an aspect of the common consent of philosophers about gratitude is noted and the metaphysical basicness of prepositional gratitude is argued for. This gives the intermediate conclusion that ‘The paradigmatic variety of gratitude is overall fitting only when targeted towards agents.’ The fourth premise is that ‘If the paradigmatic variety of gratitude is overall fitting only when targeted towards agents, then all varieties of gratitude are overall fitting only when targeted towards agents.’ To supply the conditional of this premise, the Paradigmatic Fittingness Principle is offered, which states that ‘Paradigmatic emotions set the fittingness conditions for their non-paradigmatic varieties.’ This principle is argued for by noting that it vindicates some popular and plausible intuitive judgements and gives an error theory of why one might think that gratitude could be fittingly targeted towards non-agents, and by suggesting the absence of any other plausible source of fittingness conditions for non-paradigmatic emotions.
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Notes
As a reviewer’s comment leads me to emphasize, an emotion like gratitude is therefore only fitting if there are really such things as agents. Similarly, I take no stand on various disputed cases about what things count as agents, e.g., whether governments or corporations are agents.
I suggest only that the prototype way of approaching this topic seems the most fruitful, rather than relying on the more sweeping claim that the prototype theory of concepts is the correct one (Margolis and Laurence 2019).
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Acknowledgements
For their conversation on this topic or comments on earlier versions of this paper thanks to Nicholas Allmaier, Nathan Biebel, Bruce Brower, Eric Brown, Drew Chastain, Daniel Dzah, Trevor Griffith, Jesse Hill, Corey Horn, Eli Landau, Matti Mortimore, Payten Parfait, Nicholas Sars, David Shoemaker, Daniel Tigard, Alyssa Walker, Geoffrey Weiss. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Thanks to participants at the 2019 Wisconsin Philosophical Association Conference and the 2018 Boston College Graduate Philosophy Conference.
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Hunt, M.W. Gratitude Is Only Fittingly Targeted Towards Agents. SOPHIA 61, 345–363 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-020-00811-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-020-00811-7