Gratitude to Nature*
TONY MANELA
Siena College
Department of Philosophy
Siena Hall 420
Loudonville, NY 12211
E-mail: amanela@siena.edu
ABSTRACT
In this article, I consider the claim that we ought to be grateful to nature and
argue that this claim is unjustified. I proceed by arguing against the two most
plausible lines of reasoning for the claim that we ought to be grateful to nature:
1) that nature is a fitting or appropriate object of our gratitude, and 2) that we
ought to be grateful to nature insofar as gratitude to nature enhances, preserves
or indicates in us the virtue of gratitude, a character trait we morally ought to
have. My arguments against the first line of reasoning show it to be unsound, and
my arguments against the second reveal that we actually have reasons to avoid
being grateful to nature. If we have reasons to treat nature well, I show, those
may be rooted in the appropriateness of attitudes like praise, appreciation or
compassion, but not gratitude. I conclude by highlighting several implications my
arguments entail about gratitude to entities other than nature and about
environmental virtues other than gratitude.
KEYWORDS
anthropomorphism, environment, gratitude, intention, nature, virtue
*
Forthcoming in Environmental Values. Accepted for publication on August 2, 2017.
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Insofar as nature can be distinguished from human beings, it seems undeniable
that nature benefits human beings. Should we be grateful to nature for the
benefits it confers on us? The question is an important one, given the implications
of an affirmative answer. To be grateful to someone or to something entails
having a special care for that entity—a care that manifests itself not only in certain
feelings, but in certain behaviour as well. To be grateful to nature is, in part, to
be inclined to look out for it, to benefit it, to take special care to avoid harming it,
to stand up for it when others perpetrate harm against it. Furthermore, insofar as
we should be grateful to nature, such grateful behaviours are not supererogatory.
A person who is not grateful when he should be falls short not simply of a moral
ideal or a standard of excellence, but of a moral expectation, duty or requirement.
Indeed, we generally only think about gratitude when it is called for but absent—
that is, only in the face of ingratitude, considered to be among the basest of moral
shortcomings. Thus, given certain plausible assumptions about how much human
beings have been benefited by nature and how much harm human beings cause
or allow to happen to nature, the question of whether we should be grateful to
nature is a significant one.
Most contemporary western philosophers who have considered this
question have suggested or endorsed an affirmative answer.1 In this article, my
goal is to demonstrated that these philosophers are mistaken: it is not the case that
we ought to be grateful to nature. I begin in section I by defining ‘gratitude’ and
These include, among others, Thomas Hill (1983), Robert Chapman (2002), Sean McAleer (2004 and
2012), Philip Cafaro (2005), Rosalind Hursthouse (2007), Karen Bardsley (2013), and Patrick BoleynFitzgerald (2016). Hill (1983: §2) argues that we should be grateful to nature because insofar as we are
not, this may indicate a morally problematic deficiency in or the absence of an important character
trait. Hursthouse (2007: 161) also conceptualizes gratitude as a virtue, and includes gratitude as one of
the important virtues concerned with our relationship to nature. Chapman (2002: 137 – 138) argues
that gratitude toward nature promotes wilderness and harmony, two environmental values. McAleer
(2004 and 2012) argues that nature can be a fitting object of gratitude, and that gratitude to natural
objects or environments is justified because gratitude instantiates humility, an important environmental
virtue. Cafaro (2005: 143) suggests that gratitude to nature may be the complement of the vice of
gluttony, and suggests that giving thanks may be an important way to offset this vice and to help us
understand and accept our environmental responsibilities. Boleyn-Fitzgerald (2016) argues that we
sometimes ought to be grateful to natural objects or environments for many of the same reasons we
sometimes ought to be grateful to other human beings, and he argues further that even if such attitudes
require us to personify or anthropomorphize nature and natural objects, such anthropomorphism is not
morally problematic. And Bardsley (2013) argues that even if we do not personify or anthropomorphize
nature, it still well may be an appropriate or fitting object of our gratitude for the same reasons that
typical human benefactors can be. I will discuss the strongest of these arguments in more detail in
sections II and III below. In contrast to the philosophers who put forward these arguments, the only
recent philosopher who argues explicitly against the claim that we ought to be grateful to nature dedicates
just a paragraph to his argument. See Altshuler (2014: 473 – 4).
1
2
‘nature’ and specifying the question I aim to answer in this article. In sections II
and III, I consider and reject the two most promising lines of reasoning for the
claim that we ought to be grateful to nature. The first line of reasoning reaches
its conclusion from the premise that gratitude to nature is fitting or appropriate,
given certain features of the way nature benefits us. The second line of reasoning
draws the same conclusion from the claim that being grateful to nature is
indicative of or instrumental in developing a character trait (the virtue of
gratitude) that is morally good for us to have. My refutations of both lines of
reasoning have implications for debates in moral philosophy beyond the question
of gratitude to nature, and in the final two sections of this article, I highlight two
ways in which these failures to justify gratitude to nature inform those debates. In
section IV, I show that my arguments reveal that gratitude is only ever
appropriate toward someone or something capable of forming intentions, and so,
while the appropriateness of gratitude to certain nonhuman animals remains a
possibility, the notion that we might sometimes owe gratitude to inanimate
objects is false. In section V, I show that my arguments cast doubt on an
extensionist trend in environmental ethics that seeks to include nonhuman
organisms, natural objects, whole ecosystems and nature itself as proper objects
of a range of social virtues other than the virtue of gratitude—virtues that include
friendship, goodwill, and mercy.
I. Preliminary Remarks on Gratitude and Nature
Before I begin, several clarifications are in order. The first addresses an ambiguity
in the notion of gratitude at play in the general question of whether gratitude
concerning nature is an attitude human beings ought at least sometimes to
instantiate. In asking this general question we might, on the one hand, be
wondering whether we ought to be grateful to nature, or we might, on the other
hand, be wondering whether we ought to be grateful for nature. Understanding
the difference between these two more specific questions is essential to
determining which question is of more interest to environmental ethicists.
Consider first what it means to be grateful to someone or something, a
phenomenon expressed in such locutions as ‘I am grateful to a stranger for
coming to my rescue,’ ‘I am grateful to my mentor for all her time and attention,’
and ‘I am grateful to my parents.’ As these examples show, typically when a
beneficiary says he is grateful to someone, he is grateful to her for something she
3
has done that has benefited him—some benefit she has conferred on him.2, 3 This
indicates that in the vaguest terms, gratitude to is a proper or fitting response to a
benefactor’s conferring certain benefits—to a benefactor’s beneficence.4 What
does this response consist in? Typically, it involves at least an acknowledgment in
the form of thanking. It also seems to include certain feelings—namely, what we
might think of as feelings of goodwill toward a benefactor.5 It would seem strange,
after all, for me to claim to be grateful to my mentor for giving me so much time
and attention and yet find myself with no additional goodwill toward her—no
tendency to be happy when I hear things are going well for her, upset when I
learn that things are going poorly for her. Gratitude to entails more than just
feelings, however; it also entails certain behaviours or behavioural dispositions on
the part of the beneficiary. It involves, for instance, a disposition to reciprocate
favours a benefactor has done for a beneficiary, a disposition to aid the benefactor
if she needs help in the future, and a disposition to avoid harming her.6 If I find
out that a stranger who once came to my rescue is now in need of similar rescuing,
and I can rescue her at little risk to myself, then no matter if I thank her or bear
her feelings of goodwill, it seems false to say I am grateful to her if I find myself
completely unmotivated to help her. Gratitude, then, includes certain
behavioural dispositions—what we might call dispositions of grateful beneficence
and grateful nonmaleficence toward a benefactor.7 Affective goodwill and
For the sake of clarity, I will generally refer to beneficiaries with masculine pronouns and benefactors
with feminine pronouns in the gratitude-relevant examples and generalizations I give throughout this
article.
3 Some might deny that gratitude to locutions always refer to a proper response to beneficence; but it is
difficult to imagine a plausible case of some benefactor, R, and some beneficiary, Y, such that Y should
be grateful to R despite R’s never having benefited Y in any sense.
4 Exactly what further conditions ensure that gratitude fitting or appropriate in a given case is a much
larger question—one I will address in more detail in the following section.
5 Those who note this include Walker (1980-1981: 50 – 51) and Manela (2016b).
6 For arguments that gratitude entails a disposition of reciprocity, see Manela (2016a: §2). For arguments
that gratitude entails dispositions of nonmaleficence, see Walker (1980-1981: 49) and Manela (2015:
§1).
7 Someone might object to this claim on the grounds that it seems we should sometimes be grateful to
benefactors who benefited us in the past but are currently deceased. Insofar as they are dead, it might
be argued, such benefactors cannot be benefited, and so if we are to be grateful to such entities,
benefiting such entities cannot be an essential part of gratitude to. In response to this concern, two points
are worth noting. The first is that even the deceased might very well have interests, even though these
interests no longer include what we typically think of as the central interests of living, conscious human
beings—things like physical health and pleasant experiences. People’s interests in their loved ones’
flourishing or in their projects’ coming to fruition may well continue after they die, and insofar as it
continues to be possible to advance these interests, it continues to be possible, after a benefactor’s death,
for her beneficiary to benefit her. Even if this reply is mistaken and the deceased totally lack interests
that can be advanced, this need not render nonsensical the possibility that a beneficiary might have
dispositions to advance such things. Just as a cat might have a disposition to kill rats in a world with no
2
4
grateful beneficence and nonmaleficence entail that gratitude to is, broadly, a kind
of care or concern on the part of the beneficiary for the benefactor—a care or
concern made fitting by a benefactor’s having benefited a beneficiary in certain
ways.
Now consider what it means to be grateful for. Often we talk of being
grateful for something as shorthand for being grateful to a benefactor for conferring
it, and in such cases, it would seem, being grateful for something just is being
grateful to that benefactor for conferring it. In some cases, though, it seems we
talk of being grateful for good things without being grateful to anyone in particular
for them. An atheist might say, for instance, ‘I am grateful for my family,’ ‘I am
grateful for a beautiful sunset,’ ‘I am grateful for the beautiful weather on my
wedding day,’ or ‘I am grateful for the twenty dollars I found on the ground last
week,’ without feeling grateful to anyone for these things. Being grateful for, in this
sense, is the proper response to good things—things that have some value for the
beneficiary.8 What does this response consist in? At the very least, it seems to
entail a cognitive recognition of the value of the object one is grateful for. For me
to be grateful for my family is in part to be aware of its value—to never forget it
or take it for granted. Gratitude for also seems to have an affective component—
a tendency to enjoy or take pleasure in the object of my gratitude. To be grateful
for a sunset is in part to enjoy and savour it. When laid out in this way, it becomes
clear that to be grateful for something (but not grateful to anyone for it) is
tantamount to appreciating that thing. In other words, to say ‘Y is grateful for T,’
where Y is a beneficiary and T is some benefit he has experienced, is equivalent
to saying ‘Y appreciates T.’9
There are, then, three different questions we might ask in wondering
whether we ought to be grateful concerning nature:
Q1: Should we be grateful to nature for benefits it confers on us?
Q2: Should we be grateful to someone or something for nature?
rats, a beneficiary might still well have a disposition to advance interests that turn out not to exist; so
there is no reason to think this disposition cannot play an essential role in gratitude to.
8 This value can be both instrumental or intrinsic. For example, my gratitude for twenty dollars I find
on the ground is a proper response to something that is only instrumentally valuable to me. By contrast,
my gratitude for a beautiful sunset or the beautiful weather on my wedding day is my response to
something I value not as a means to some further end but as something valuable in itself. I am grateful
to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to note this.
9 I make a similar point about statements of the form ‘Y is grateful that p,’ where p is a proposition, in
Manela (2016a: §5).
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Q3: Should we be grateful for nature but not necessarily grateful to anyone
for it?
In this article, I will not attempt to answer Q2 or Q3. Q2, while intriguing, is
really a question about the benefactor or benefactors that provide us with the
benefit that is nature, and answering that question would require elaboration on
metaphysical and theistic premises that are outside the scope of this article.10 Q3
is also an important question, but for environmental ethicists, it is less important
than Q1 for at least two reasons. The first of these is that insofar as Q3 is identical
to the question of whether we ought to appreciate nature, I take it the answer is
obvious and uncontroversial. It seems impossible to deny that nature is, on
balance, a benefit for human beings, and it is true by definition that we ought to
appreciate benefits. The second reason Q3 is less important than Q1 is that
establishing the claim that we ought to appreciate nature doesn’t do enough to
justify the particular sort of criticism that seems warranted of those who harm or
fail to protect nature. A person who doesn’t appreciate things he should be
grateful for, like the person who doesn’t appreciate good weather on his wedding
day or twenty dollars he finds on the ground, may fall short of certain ideals. But
even if he squanders the money and fails to notice or remember the beautiful
weather on his wedding day, the worst we can say of such a person, it seems, is
that he is insensitive, foolish or unwise. This is also the worst we can say of a
person who doesn’t appreciate nature. By contrast, a person who should be
grateful to nature but harms it, or fails to protect it when it is in distress, is more
than just insensitive, foolish or unwise—just as a person who fails to help his
former rescuer is more than just foolish or unwise. Such a person is ungrateful—
someone who is insufficiently concerned about a benefactor who benefited him;
and the condemnation warranted in response to this person’s ingratitude is
precisely the harsh moral blame, reproach and indignation that many
environmental ethicists want to say is warranted by those who wantonly harm
nature. Between Q1 and Q3, it is only Q1 whose answer might entail
condemnation this severe.11 For these reasons, then, the question of whether we
should be grateful to nature is the question I will pursue in this article.
For a partial treatment of this question, see Taliaferro (2005: 163).
Someone might insist that harsh criticism is warranted by those who fail to appreciate certain things
of intrinsic value. A person who fails to appreciate his family in a way that leads them to suffer may
warrant such responses as reproach, blame and indignation, for instance. In a similar vein, it might be
argued that someone who fails to appreciate a beautiful work of art, something with intrinsic aesthetic
value, might deserve blame and indignation if he fails to, say, wade into a creek to save such a work of
art from being destroyed. It seems to me, though, that these cases are not counterexamples to the claim
that failure to appreciate does not warrant blame or indignation. When a person fails to appreciate his
family and thereby causes them to suffer, he deserves blame not because he failed to appreciate his
10
11
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Before I begin, one final specification of this question is in order. The
question on which I will focus is not whether we should be grateful to specific
organisms we might find in nature, but whether we should be grateful to nature
itself as a whole, or to whole ecosystems.12 This point might raise a concern about
a presupposition underlying the question of whether we ought to be grateful to
nature—specifically, the presupposition that we and nature are distinct entities. As
some philosophers have pointed out, nature has always already been so heavily
influenced by human beings, and human beings by nature, that distinguishing
the two may be impossible.13 This is a serious concern for anyone who wants to
argue that we ought to be grateful to nature, but I will not address it at length in
this article. Instead, throughout this article I will take as a model a highly idealized
scenario that distinguishes humans and nature more cleanly than could be
expected in the real world, and I do this with the understanding that if even in
this model it is implausible that humans ought to be grateful to nature, that claim
will be, at best, just as implausible in more complex and realistic models of the
relationship between humans and nature as well.
The idealized scenario I will consider is the case of a small village of human
beings in the middle of a larger ecosystem that, beyond the borders of the village,
is not (nor has ever been) populated by humans. The humans of the village
venture out into the nearby forests, fields and mountains to hunt and to gather
food, water, wood and medicinal herbs and to enjoy the sights and sounds outside
the village. Though there are dangers outside the village (e.g., certain predators
and pests), the materials the humans seek outside the village are relatively plentiful
and easy to procure. I will refer to the humans in this scenario in the plural firstperson (as ‘we’ and ‘us’), and I will refer to the totality of everything that is not
the humans or the village as ‘nature.’
II. Nature as a Fitting Object of Gratitude
The most straightforward way to argue that we ought to be grateful to nature is
to show that certain features of us, nature, and our relationship to nature make
family, but because he failed to uphold certain moral responsibilities he had to protect them from
suffering. When a person fails to appreciate a priceless work of art enough to dirty his clothes in order
to save it, he gives us strong reason to believe he is unusually selfish or lazy; but it is clear that any
condemnation he deserves for his failure here is different in kind from what he would deserve if he had
let an innocent person, or worse still, a benefactor, drown or suffer harm under the same circumstances.
12 The former question is certainly an interesting one, but it deserves an article of its own. I return to it
briefly in the penultimate section of the current article.
13 See, for instance, Vogel (2002).
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gratitude to nature fitting, appropriate or warranted. Such an argument would
rest on the following premises:
P1: We receive benefits from nature.
P2: Nature issues these benefits to us in a way that makes nature an
appropriate or fitting object of gratitude.
The argument is valid, and P1, I will take it, is beyond dispute. The argument is
vulnerable to a strong objection, however, that stems from two claims, the first of
which is the widely-held claim that in order for some benefactor to be an
appropriate object of a particular beneficiary’s gratitude, it must be the case that
the benefactor benefited that beneficiary intentionally.14 Let’s call this the
‘standard view’ about the conditions under which gratitude is fitting or
appropriate. The second claim is that nature is incapable of acting intentionally.
Together, the standard view and the claim that nature is incapable of intentional
action entail the falsity of P2, rendering the argument above a nonstarter.
There are several ways a defender of this argument might respond. She
could, in the first place, try to argue that nature really is capable of intentional
behaviour.15 Proponents of this view might point out that nature does
demonstrate certain persistent tendencies (e.g., the tendency to preserve
homeostasis), and that some of these tendencies may be candidates for a kind of
goal-directed behaviour. Proponents of this view might also note that agency
comes in many different varieties, and that nature may very well possess a sort of
agency that makes gratitude warranted even if nature is incapable of the sort of
conscious deliberative intentional action that most human beings are capable of.16
Ultimately, though, this response is unsuccessful for two reasons. First, it is
doubtful whether any of the apparent tendencies we see in nature actually
constitute the sort of goal-directed behaviour necessary for intentional action,
rather than, say, mere byproducts or side-effects of the intentional behaviours of
other entities within nature.17 Second, even if we grant that certain apparent
tendencies in nature constitute genuine goal-directed behaviours, none of those
behaviours (e.g., an ecosystem’s preserving its equilibrium) are the sort of
beneficent behaviour that warrants gratitude, because none of them are done or
intended under the description of benefiting us. Gratitude, in order to be
14 Virtually every philosopher who writes about gratitude endorses this claim. See, for instance,
Simmons (1979: 171), Berger (1975), Weiss (1985), and Manela (2016a).
15 Those who suggest this route include, among others, Johnson (1991) and Card (2004).
16 This suggestion is put forward in Plumwood (1998) and Plumwood (2001).
17 Cahen (1988). See also Andrews (1998).
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warranted in a beneficiary, requires not only that the benefactor be capable of
intentional action, but also that the benefactor intend to benefit the beneficiary
under the description ‘benefit the beneficiary.’ A benefactor who acts with the
aim of benefiting himself or preserving himself, and only incidentally benefits
those whose wellbeing is contingently tied to his own, does not deserve gratitude
from all those who derive incidental benefits from his intentional action.18 And it
seems clear that if ecosystems aim at anything at all, the most they aim at is the
preservation of their own stability.19 There is no reason to believe that they aim
to benefit particular organisms, species or populations.20 So even if we grant that
ecosystems are capable of intentional behaviour, nature does not benefit humans
intentionally under the description ‘benefiting humans’—and that much, at least,
appears necessary for our gratitude to nature to be fitting or appropriate.
Given that we lack sufficient reason to believe nature benefits us
intentionally, it seems that in order to argue that nature warrants our gratitude,
one must argue that an intention on the part of the benefactor to benefit the
beneficiary is not necessary for gratitude to be appropriate or fitting. One recent
argument to this effect comes from Karen Bardsley, who writes that gratitude to
some benefactor, R, can be fitting or appropriate when two conditions obtain: (1)
R is the source of an undeserved benefit, and (2) that benefit is not the product of
an accidental or regrettable aspect of R.21 Let’s call this Bardsley’s Thesis, or BT
for short.
BT has an initial plausibility, and, some might argue, several virtues
compared to the standard view. As Bardsley points out, BT allows us to make the
Arguments for this claim can be found in Manela (2016a: §2). I give several scenarios later in this
section to make the same point.
19 Indeed, most of the examples of ecosystem intention that weak panpsychists like Plumwood put
forward are ecosystems’ intentions to preserve themselves.
20 This is something that even weak panpsychists like Plumwood might be inclined to concede.
Plumwood seems to understand intention, in the sense we might attribute to ecosystems, as causal
dispositions. If an ecosystem intended to benefit its human inhabitants (under that description, rather
than as a byproduct of its intention to preserve its own equilibrium), then it would be disposed to defend
humans from encroachment by another species that perfectly occupies the same niche that humans
occupy. But this seems implausible. Imagine that a population of another hominid species migrated into
the ecosystem I described in section I above. The new species interacts with the rest of the ecosystem in
just the way the human population does. Despite their similarity, however, the new hominids begin
systematically exterminating and replacing the human population. It seems to me that as long as the
process of extermination and replacement does not disturb the other species, organisms and other
natural objects that make up the ecosystem, we have no reason to believe that nature would go out of
its way to protect its human inhabitants from their slaughter. To think otherwise would be to project
desires or beliefs of our own (e.g., that we are special, worthy of nature’s special consideration and
intentional protection) onto nature, and this projection would seem to imply not only ignorance but
arrogance. I take up this point in more detail in section III below.
21 Bardsley (2013: 36).
18
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plausible claim that a beneficiary might appropriately be grateful to nonhuman
entities that do not seem capable of intentions, like rescue dogs or institutions.22
BT also allows us to say that gratitude may be fitting or appropriate in response
to certain human actions that are so natural, fluid and spontaneous that it seems
false to call them intentional in any robust sense.23
Importantly, BT entails the falsity of the standard view of the conditions
under which gratitude is warranted. If a benefactor’s having acted intentionally
is not necessary for Bardsley’s conditions (1) and (2), and if (1) and (2) are sufficient
for gratitude to be warranted, then a benefactor’s having acted intentionally is
not necessary for that benefactor to warrant gratitude.
BT also seems to positively entail that our gratitude to nature is warranted.
As Bardsley says, nature benefits us, it does so not in virtue of anything we have
done to earn those benefits, and the features of nature that result in those benefits
are not accidental or regrettable.24 Insofar as BT is plausible and entails the
appropriateness of our gratitude to nature, it appears to be a strong reply to my
objection to P2, one that could save the argument that nature can be a proper or
fitting object of gratitude.
Ultimately, though, BT is not as plausible as it may seem at first glance.
We can find reason to doubt it in cases like the following: Imagine Yorick, a
vicious criminal, is being chased by Roberta, a just and virtuous police officer
who wants to arrest Yorick and throw him in prison for life.25 Yorick realizes that
Roberta is catching up to him and will catch him unless he, Yorick, does
something. Thinking quickly as he passes some railroad tracks, Yorick shoves a
nearby innocent child onto the tracks and into the path of an oncoming train.
Ibid. (35, fn. 20).
Ibid. (34).
24 Though I will not argue at length against them here, it is worth noting that these claims could be
disputed. It might be argued that the benefits nature gives us are in fact deserved, insofar as human
beings benefit nature in certain ways and thereby come to deserve nature’s benefits as a matter of
reciprocity. It might also be disputed whether the benefits humans get from nature actually result from
non-accidental, non-regrettable characteristics of nature. In response to these points, Bardsley might
note that even if nature itself as we know it today is thus not an appropriate object of gratitude, BT still
grounds a strong argument that environments in the future may be fitting objects of gratitude. We might
one day, for instance, owe gratitude to environments on planets that we have terraformed to suit our
needs—environments that are beneficial and benefit us in ways that are not accidental. BT may also
ground a strong argument for the fittingness of our gratitude to certain species (or individual members
of species) that co-evolved with us, like domestic cats. Domestic cats reside (somewhat) agreeably in our
houses and eradicate pests, and this combination of beneficial traits having arisen in them may not be
purely accidental. See Driscoll, et al. (2007).
25 For the sake of clarity, I use paradigmatically masculine names beginning with the letter Y to
designate the beneficiary and paradigmatically feminine names beginning with the letter R to designate
the benefactor in this and the following gratitude-relevant scenarios. Additional third parties I identify
with names beginning with the letter D.
22
23
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Just as Yorick predicts, Roberta, being the decent person she is, breaks off her
chase and risks her life to save the child, thus allowing Yorick to escape.
Here, Roberta has benefited Yorick in a way that Yorick did not deserve,
and she did so from a non-accidental and non-regrettable aspect of her
character.26 BT tells us Yorick should be grateful to Roberta for letting him go,
that Yorick’s gratitude to Roberta is fitting or appropriate. But intuitively, that
seems quite odd. Imagine that later that day, another officer catches and arrests
Yorick and brings Yorick to the police station, where Roberta confronts him. It
would seem inappropriate and irrational were Yorick to thank Roberta sincerely
for letting him go (though sarcastic thanks of this sort might be just the kind of
thing that would irk Roberta). It might be fair to say that Yorick should appreciate
or be glad that Roberta broke off her chase, and it might be reasonable to expect
Yorick to praise Roberta; but gratitude here seems out of place. Insofar as this is
the case, an undeserved benefit that results from a non-accidental good
characteristic is not sufficient to say that gratitude is warranted or appropriate.
This entails that BT is mistaken and suggests that the standard view is right: what
gratitude is really a proper response to is intentional beneficence, and so intention
is necessary for gratitude to be appropriate.
A defender of BT might not be persuaded by my example above. Bardsley
herself, for instance, suggests that it is not lack of good intention that renders
gratitude unwarranted in cases like that of Yorick and Roberta; rather, it is the
presence of bad intentions.27 In my example above, she might argue, it is
Roberta’s bad intentions toward Yorick—e.g., Roberta’s desire to put Yorick in
prison— that make it the case that gratitude is not appropriate. If that is true, this
case would not necessarily be a counterexample to BT.
It seems to me, though, that Bardsley’s reply does not save BT. Consider a
modified version of the case I gave above: Renee and Yorick are running away
from Diana, a just and virtuous law enforcement officer who is chasing them.
Diana can only arrest one of them, and she will arrest whichever one she catches
up to first. As the chase wears on, Diana starts to gain on Yorick and Renee, and
Yorick begins to fall behind Renee. Yorick and Renee are not partners, and each
is perfectly indifferent to the other’s wellbeing; neither Renee nor Yorick bear any
good or ill will toward the other. Renee, however, is a somewhat decent person,
while Yorick is not. As they are both running past some railroad tracks, they see
The fact that this situation features certain regrettable accidents, like the presence of a child and the
presence of an oncoming train, does not affect BT’s implication that Yorick’s gratitude to Roberta is
appropriate here. All that matters for gratitude to be appropriate, according to BT, is that Yorick has
been benefited in a way he did not deserve by something Roberta did that was not a result of a nonaccidental and non-regrettable aspect of her character.
27 Bardsley (2013: 36).
26
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an innocent child fall onto tracks and into the path of an oncoming train. Renee
stops and saves the child because Renee is a decent person, and thereby allows
Diana to catch up to her and arrest her first. Here, Renee has benefited Yorick,
who escapes, and she has done so as a result of a laudable and non-accidental
part of her character. Furthermore, Renee bears no ill will toward Yorick. But
again, it seems wrong to say that Yorick owes Renee gratitude for what Renee
did. It would seem improper for Yorick to thank Renee, should Yorick ever have
the chance, for helping him escape. And if he did, Renee would likely reply, after
the fact, quite sincerely, ‘I didn’t do it for you. In fact, I couldn’t have cared less
what happened to you. And while I don’t bear you any especial ill will, and while
I wasn’t unhappy that you escaped, I wouldn’t have lost a wink of sleep if you’d
been caught, arrested, and thrown in prison for life.’ It hardly seems like gratitude
is warranted or fitting in cases of such cool indifference, and yet I see no reason
to doubt that this is what nature would say to those of us who thank it, if nature
could speak.
Insofar as this is true, BT is indefensible: the mere absence of negative
intention (together with an undeserved benefit from a non-accidental and nonregrettable characteristic of a benefactor) is not sufficient for gratitude to be
appropriate. Bardsley’s Thesis gives us no reason to doubt the standard view that
intentions are necessary for gratitude to be appropriate;28 and insofar as nature is
incapable of intention, it can never be appropriate or fitting for us to be grateful
to nature. If it is the case that we ought to be grateful to nature, then it cannot be
because features of the relationship between us, nature, and the benefits nature
conveys to us make our gratitude to nature appropriate; it must be for another
reason. It is to this possibility I now turn.
There still remain the cases Bardsley mentions of entities that seem to be appropriate objects of
gratitude even though they appear incapable of forming intentions. One of the strengths of BT was its
ability to explain our intuitions in such cases; but if Bardsley’s Thesis is mistaken, we continue to stand
in need of an explanation for why it seems, for instance, that rescuees owe rescue dogs gratitude for
saving them, or that sometimes people can owe gratitude to institutions, like universities, for benefiting
them. There are several ways this concern might be addressed. The first is to argue that rescue dogs
and institutions are indeed capable of intentions, though these intentions may take a different form from
those experienced and formed by conscious human beings. This concern might also be addressed by
arguing that even if nonhuman animals and institutions are incapable of forming genuine intentions,
their behaviour may nonetheless give the convincing appearance of being genuinely intentional. This
appearance may be so convincing, in fact, that a grateful person—a person with the disposition to
recognize such appearances as evidence of intention—will be disposed to treat nonhuman animals and
institutions that act in such ways gratefully. And insofar as we all should be grateful people, we all
sometimes should react gratefully to things that appear to have benevolent intentions. I explore this
possibility in more detail in the following section.
28
12
III. Nature and the Virtue of Gratitude
Even if nature is not strictly speaking an appropriate or fitting object of our
gratitude, it might be thought that we still ought to be grateful to nature because
there is a certain indirect or extrinsic value in being so. Thomas Hill famously
argued that in failing to be grateful to nature, we evince an absence of a valuable
character trait or disposition that is good in itself, or good insofar as it leads us to
be grateful to those who genuinely deserve our gratitude.29 This character trait is
the virtue of gratitude, and it is the disposition to perceive and recognize
benevolence from a benefactor and to respond to this benevolence by developing
the properly grateful affective and behavioural tendencies vis-à-vis that
benefactor.
There are two ways this conception of the virtue of gratitude can be
marshalled to make the case that we ought to be grateful to nature. According to
the first, one reason we ought to be grateful to nature is the same sort of reason
that we ought to be viscerally averse to mutilating lifelike dolls or causing the
brutal deaths of humanoid characters in lifelike videogames. It is not that there is
anything intrinsically wrong with either of those acts; but people who do them
without batting an eye may thereby reveal a worrisome deficiency in their
disposition to avoid doing them to actual people. This might be either a deficiency
in their ability to recognize situations in which anti-cruelty behaviour is called for
or a deficiency in the anti-cruelty tendencies they form in response to the
appearance of such situations. By the same token, a person who feels no gratitude
toward a humanoid robot that brings him a drink or a lifelike video game
character that helps him advance in the game might thereby evince a worrisome
lack of sensitivity to evidence of benevolence or a worrisome failure to develop
the inclinations to feel and act gratefully upon the recognition of such evidence.
These are both essential aspects of the virtue of gratitude, a disposition that we
must have if we are to reliably treat with gratitude everyone and everything that
genuinely deserves it. Insofar as we ought to have this disposition, and insofar as
failure to be grateful to nature indicates an absence of or deficiency in such a
disposition, we ought to be grateful to nature.
Alternatively, it might be the case that we ought to be grateful to nature
because insofar as we are not, we undermine a character trait that is essential to
treating properly the people and things that genuinely deserve our gratitude. On
this view, we ought to be grateful to nature for the same sort of reason that Kant
thought we ought to be grateful and kind to certain nonhuman animals.30 Kant
29
30
Hill (1983). Other philosophers who have endorsed a similar view include McAleer (2004).
Kant (1979: 212).
13
believed that even though I do not violate a perfect obligation in, say, mistreating
or neglecting a faithful dog, and even though I do not owe it to the animal itself
to refrain from doing so, it is still bad for me to mistreat or neglect such an animal
insofar as I thereby deaden in myself a certain sensitivity and a certain disposition
to treat fellow humans gratefully and uncruelly, and those things I am obligated
to do. By the same token, if I fail to be grateful to a humanoid robot or a lifelike
video game character when they benefit me, I might be undermining in myself
the sorts of inclinations that constitute the virtue of gratitude, which we ought to
have if only for the sake of reliably treating properly those who are genuinely
appropriate objects of gratitude; and so, even though such entities are not in
themselves appropriate objects of gratitude, it may still be the case that I ought to
be grateful to them.
Either of these possibilities, if true, might give us reason to believe that we
ought to be grateful to nature even if nature is not, strictly speaking, an
appropriate object of our gratitude. Ultimately, however, neither possibility seems
very plausible, since nature is so much less humanoid than a lifelike doll or a
humanoid robot or character in a realistic videogame. Nature may indeed benefit
us, and it may indeed suffer at our hands, but the ways in which nature does these
things are very different from the ways in which appropriate objects of gratitude
(typically benevolent human benefactors) do. The experience of being benefited
by nature will thus be very different from the experience of being benefited by a
benevolent benefactor (or something that gives the impression of being a
benevolent benefactor). The differences will be so great, in fact, that we would
not expect a grateful person’s sensitivity to evidence of benevolence and
benefactor-suffering to get triggered by nature, the way we would expect the
sensitivities of such agents to be triggered by the behaviours of certain humanoid
but non-gratitude-deserving entities. If this is the case, then a person who feels no
gratitude after being benefited by nature does not thereby evince any lack of a
grateful disposition. Nor does such a person necessarily undermine a grateful
disposition by habituating himself to overlook evidence of benevolence or
benefactor-suffering, since nature does not present sufficient evidence of
benevolence or suffer in any way that resembles the suffering of any genuinely
gratitude-deserving benefactor.
Still, even if nature does not present enough evidence to evoke a grateful
response in those with the virtue of gratitude, it might be suggested that there is
something natural about anthropomorphizing nature and attributing to it, despite
lack of sufficient evidence, the intention to benefit us. It might be suggested,
14
further, that we ought to embrace any natural tendency that we have to do so.31
At the very least, doing so would give us one more object to whom to practice
being grateful. It might also enhance our psychological wellbeing, insofar as being
grateful is thought to consist, in part, of a positive or agreeable feeling, and the
more things we have to be grateful to, the more we get to experience that feeling.32
There are three problems with this line of reasoning. The first is that
grateful feelings are not invariably positive, and may sometimes be quite negative
and painful.33 This is because to be grateful to something is, in part, to care about
it, and to care about something is to be disposed not only to be pleased when
things go well for it, but also to be upset when things go poorly for it. To be
grateful to nature is, in part, to be upset or saddened when nature suffers, and
anyone who believes we ought to be grateful to nature will also likely believe that
nature suffers constantly and on a massive scale. Gratitude to nature, then, may
be quite antithetical to psychological wellbeing. This does not necessarily mean
we should avoid being grateful to anyone or anything that might suffer; but it
does give us reason not to be nonchalant in deciding whom or what to be grateful
to, insofar as we can decide such things for the sake of our own mental wellbeing.
A second concern about anthropomorphizing nature is that insofar as we
allow ourselves to attribute human attitudes to nature when it comes to the good
things nature does, we may find ourselves more and more inclined to attribute
intentions to nature when it dishes out unpleasant things as well. For example, if
I allow myself to see nature’s benefits to me as having been intentionally
bestowed, then I may well find myself resenting nature whenever nature harms
me in some way. Worse still, when I hear of benefits nature has provided others,
I might find myself getting jealous; and when I learn of natural catastrophes that
have befallen others but not me, I might find myself inclined to think nature had
a good reason to harm those it did.34 One might think that we could simply
regulate when and how we anthropomorphize nature, making sure we only ever
do so when nature benefits us. But this precision in self-regulation seems
unrealistic, and even if it were possible, it too might well be morally problematic.
It could, for example, leave us with the arrogant and narcissistic impression that
nature adores us, unambivalently cares about us, thinks us special enough to
benefit. Indeed, this feature of gratitude—that it implies the beneficiary finds it
This possibility is raised by Bardsley (2013: 38 fn 29). It is argued for more emphatically by BoleynFitzgerald (2016).
32 Those who suggest or make the claim that gratitude is or entails a positive feeling include Seneca
(2010), Camenisch (1981), Card (1988), Fitzgerald (1998), Bruton (2003), Ceaser (2011), Gulliford, et
al. (2013), and Boleyn-Fitzgerald (2016).
33 Manela (2016b).
34This last possibility would explain why the more people anthropomorphize nature, the less willing
they are to provide help to the victims of natural disasters. See Sacchi, et al. (2013: 273).
31
15
plausible that the benefactor thought him worth benefiting—is one of the features
that would render Yorick’s gratitude to Renee and Roberta so offensive.
The third concern we should have with anthropomorphizing nature freely
is that doing so may undermine an important component of the virtue of
gratitude. Gratitude is a kind of social virtue that is partly constituted by a
disposition to accurately discern the intentions of others. Without this disposition,
a person cannot accurately tell when a benefactor is being beneficent in a way
that warrants gratitude, and thus cannot accurately tell when grateful treatment
(the feelings and behaviours that make up a grateful response to benevolence) is
in fact due. A person who allows himself to anthropomorphize and intentionalize
nature may come to see intentions that are not really there, even when he is
dealing with other human beings.35 He may thus come to feel gratitude too often,
and may wind up feeling and behaving gratefully toward people who lack the
intentions that genuinely warrant gratitude. At the extreme, this may take the
form of grateful feelings and behaviours toward people who deserve indignation
and resentment rather than gratitude—say, abusive teachers, friends or spouses.
Undeserved gratitude in contexts like this—what we might call overgratitude—can
amount to a pathological lack of self-respect, something like the vice of servility.36
The only way to avoid drifting away from the mean of a grateful disposition
toward a vice like overgrateful servility is to cultivate and protect our disposition
to accurately discern intentions. This we fail to do when we give free rein to any
tendency, however natural, to anthropomorphize and intentionalize non-agent
entities like nature. Rather than preserving or reinforcing virtuous dispositions
like gratitude, then, being grateful to nature actually jeopardizes and undermines
such dispositions.
IV. Implications for Gratitude
In the preceding sections of this article, I argued against the claim that we ought
to be grateful to nature. I first considered and rejected the possibility that nature
might be an appropriate or fitting object of gratitude. I rejected this possibility on
the grounds that gratitude is properly a response only to intentional benefitting
This is especially clear in the case of virtues like the disposition to experience resentment at the right
times, in response to the right things, to the right degree. A person who anthropomorphizes nature and
attributes intentions to it that it does not have may come to feel resentful of nature whenever nature
causes him harm, and may eventually come to resent anything that causes him harm, regardless of what
evidence of intention it presents. Such a person may thus wind up feeling resentment far too often—
resenting children, pets and household appliances that cause him harm but are not to blame for doing
so.
36 For an argument for this claim, see Manela (2015).
35
16
from a benefactor, and nature is incapable of intentional action. I considered and
rejected Bardsley’s Thesis—a strong recent argument against the standard view
that intentionality is necessary for gratitude to be appropriate. I then considered
and rejected the possibility that we ought to be grateful to nature because
gratitude to nature indicates or enhances or preserves a character trait that is
morally good for us to have. I concluded with several reasons why we should resist
the tendency to anthropomorphize nature that goes hand in hand with trying to
be grateful to it.
Several of the arguments I have put forward have implications beyond the
question of gratitude to ecosystems or to nature generally. My arguments against
Thomas Hill’s position, for example, also cast doubt on the claim that we ought
to be grateful to inanimate objects or to non-agent organisms. I noted earlier that
gratitude is a special kind of social virtue, one that is partly constituted by a
disposition to accurately discern the intentions of others. When we allow ourselves
to anthropomorphize nature, I argued, we erode this disposition and thereby
undermine the virtue of gratitude in ourselves as well. But the same thing can
happen when we try or allow ourselves to feel grateful toward objects like an old
but reliable car, a body part of which we are especially fond,37 or even natural
objects like rocks, rivers and trees. When we tell a child, for example, to be
grateful to an apple tree for the apples it gives him, we subtly encourage him to
overlook the fact that the tree shows no evidence that it cares about him or wants
to benefit him, and learning to recognize just that kind of evidence (and its
absence) is a fundamental part of what we should teach children as we help them
develop into properly grateful people. Furthermore, a child who is told to be
grateful to apple trees for giving him their apples may very well wind up
developing the problematically arrogant belief that he is more special than he is—
or, at least, more special to apple trees than he really is. Believing such things
seems inconsistent with environmental virtues like humility, insofar as that virtue
is partly constituted by knowing one’s place in nature.38
I must note here that although I have argued that there is no place in
environmental ethics for gratitude to ecosystems, to nature as a whole, or to
inanimate objects within ecosystems, there may still be a place for the virtue of
gratitude in environmental ethics broadly construed. After all, nature is made up
of other entities, and it may occasionally be appropriate for us to be grateful to
some of them. It seems plausible, for instance, that certain non-domesticated
nonhuman animals are capable of the sorts of intentional action that human
beings are, and that some of those animals might sometimes benefit human beings
Both these examples come from Boleyn-Fitzgerald (2016).
Hill (1983: §3). Being grateful for inanimate objects, however, may very well be an important part of
humility vis-à-vis nature.
37
38
17
intentionally, under the description ‘helping humans.’ A dolphin that lifts a
drowning human to the surface of the ocean, for example, might plausibly be said
to deserve gratitude for the rescue. The same might even be said for groups of
animals. A pod of dolphins, for instance, that forms a protective circle around a
human swimmer just the way it does for young dolphins when a shark is nearby
seems to be intentionally protecting the swimmer from the shark. Even if these or
other natural entities lack the capacity to form the genuine intentions necessary
for gratitude to be fitting or appropriate, their behaviour may still be similar
enough in appearance to the intentional benevolence of human individual or
collective agents to make Hill’s arguments about gratitude to nature relevant. The
claim that we ought to be grateful to certain natural entities thus strikes me as
promising. Putting forward a sound argument for that conclusion, however,
would require a specification of the kind of intention that is necessary on the part
of the benefactor for her or it to come to be a fitting object of gratitude, as well as
evidence for the claim that certain animals and/or groups of animals are capable
of forming that kind of intention regarding the wellbeing of human beings. While
such a project is outside the scope of this article, I believe my analysis of gratitude
to nature provides a helpful framework for it.
V. Implications for Other Environmental Virtues
My arguments have implications for environmental virtues beyond gratitude,
both as such virtues might concern nature as a whole and as they might concern
individual organisms within it. Many social virtues, after all, are like gratitude in
that they are partly constituted by a disposition to accurately discern the
intentions of others. Such virtues might include forgiveness, contrition, mercy,
justice, loyalty, friendship, goodwill, and love. Some philosophers have been
tempted to suggest that we extend the domain of certain of these virtues to include
as their objects things in the natural world, perhaps even whole ecosystems and
nature generally. Several such philosophers argue for this extensionist claim by
trying to demonstrate that the natural objects in question have interests, or at
least the semblance of interests, that can be advanced in accordance with such
virtues. Matt Ferkany, for example, has developed an account of mercy as
intentionally treating another entity less harshly than one is entitled, by certain
social rules, to treat that entity.39 On this definition, Ferkany notes, whether or
not natural objects can be proper objects of mercy depends on whether they have
interests and whether relevant social rules give certain agents a chance to treat
39
Ferkany (2011: 270).
18
nature or natural objects less harshly.40 He then argues that both these conditions
are met, at least in the case of certain natural objects or organisms. In a similar
vein, Christopher Freiman has recently argued that goodwill is a virtue that can
be cultivated toward nature. Freiman understands goodwill in the Aristotelian
sense of wishing another well for the other’s own sake, without requiring
reciprocation.41 According to Freiman, nature has a good of its own, and so we
can (and should) wish it well for its own sake.
Both Ferkany’s and Freiman’s arguments seem largely plausible, at least
insofar as they attend to the interests of natural objects as would-be objects of
mercy and goodwill, respectively. But their accounts of those virtues fail to
adequately consider the attitudes and intentions of the would-be object of mercy
and goodwill, and recognizing these attitudes and intentions is an important part
of what it means to be a properly merciful and goodwill-bearing person. Consider
first mercy. To be a properly merciful person, one needs to strike a mean between
the vice of ruthlessness, on the one hand, and the vice of softheartedness, on the
other. The properly merciful agent will take many factors into account in
determining the right amount of harshness to expose someone or something to,
and one of those factors, it seems to me, will be the attitudes and intentions of the
relevant second party. A party who harms me and shows no remorse or concern
about my suffering, for instance, deserves more harshness than a person who
harms me and then shows remorse and a commitment never to repeat the
behaviour; and someone who shows the former party as much harshness as the
latter is likely guilty of ruthlessness, softheartedness, or an incoherent mixture of
the two. A merciful agent, then, will look for evidence of and take into account
the attitudes and intentions of the party to whom he is considering being harsh.
Most natural objects, however, give us no reason to believe they possess any such
intentions. When we are urged nonetheless to try to see such objects as proper
objects of mercy, not only does that fail to facilitate the development of proper
mercifulness toward other humans, but it may also very well erode that virtue in
the contexts where it actually should apply, insofar as trying to be merciful to
things without intention erodes our sensitivity to the intentions of others, and this
sensitivity is necessary for being a properly merciful person.
Consider next goodwill. Goodwill itself, the way Freiman and Aristotle
conceive of it, is not technically a virtue (understood as a relatively stable
character trait a person can possess), but an attitude one can have toward
someone or something outside oneself. The virtue associated with this attitude
would be the disposition to form attitudes of goodwill at the right times, to the
40
41
Ibid.
Freiman (2009).
19
right parties, to the proper degree, with the proper duration. Among the factors
that a person with this virtue should take into account are the attitudes and
intentions of the would-be object of goodwill. This is what explains why a virtuous
person will manifest different levels of goodwill toward a vicious, dishonest athlete
who cheats, on the one hand, and a hardworking athlete with good sportsmanship
who never cheats, on the other. Being able to make these distinctions is a crucial
part of what it is to be a properly goodwill-bearing person, and we threaten to
erode this ability when we urge people to unreflectively maximize goodwill
toward anything that has the semblance of interests.
One thing environmental virtue ethicists should take away from my
arguments, then, is a reluctance to argue that we should cultivate vis-à-vis nature
the class of social virtues partly constituted by a disposition to discern the
intentions of others, at least so long as we lack reason to believe that nature and
creatures within it are capable of the sort of agency necessary to warrant attitudes
like gratitude, goodwill and mercy. The fact that certain natural objects have or
appear to have interests may be sufficient to show that they are proper objects of
virtues like compassion (a virtuous disposition to avert or minimize suffering), and
it may be necessary for them to be proper objects of social virtues like the virtues
of gratitude, goodwill and mercy. But these latter social virtues are appropriate
only when their objects have intentions (or similar attitudes) as well as interests,
and since nature and many natural objects give us no evidence they are capable
of forming intentions (or similar attitudes), we should be reluctant to urge people
to try to develop such dispositions toward nature; for when we do, we mould them
into the sorts of people who stop looking for such evidence—the sorts of people
who are too undiscerning to be properly and unambiguously ascribed the virtues
of gratitude, goodwill and mercy, among others.42
My conclusion here should not be taken too far. Just because it is not the
case that we ought to be grateful or merciful to nature or many of the objects
within it doesn’t mean we should be indifferent to these things. Indeed, as I
suggested earlier, it seems very plausible that we ought to appreciate nature, and
perhaps even praise it—just as Yorick ought to appreciate the benefit of having
escaped a lifetime in prison and praise the qualities of Roberta and Renee that
led him to escape such a fate. And even though appreciation and praise together
do not amount to gratitude (as the scenarios with Yorick show), praise and
Interestingly, even though a person who takes natural objects as proper objects of mercy or gratitude
may thereby fail to be a fully merciful or grateful person, he might still deserve to be ascribed the virtue
of compassion, insofar as he rightly attends to the object’s interests, recognizes evidence of the object’s
suffering and is properly averse to that suffering.
42
20
appreciation should still drive us to protect nature, to care for it, and treat it well.43
This is especially true when we combine praise and appreciation with other
virtues, like compassion, which can be appropriate or fitting toward even those
objects that have no intentions to benefit us.
Still, even if the motivational effects are the same, it makes an important
difference whether we think of nature as a proper object of appreciation, praise
and compassion rather than as a proper object of gratitude. If it were the case
that we ought to be grateful to nature, then someone who mistreated nature
would be ungrateful—and ingratitude is rightly thought of as one of the basest
moral vices. An ingrate is someone who betrays the goodwill of his benefactor by
stabbing her in the back or neglecting her when she is in distress; someone who
does not take his commitments (e.g., to the wellbeing of his benefactors) seriously;
someone incapable of being relied upon; someone we would not want to befriend.
Litterbugs, polluters, poachers, energy over-consumers and resource-wasters may
well fall short of virtue in various ways. They may be unappreciative, greedy,
arrogant, immoderate, callous and insensitive. But we do them an injustice if we
label them ingrates, and we should resist the urge to do so.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to an audience at Radford University, to students in my 2016 and
2017 courses on environmental ethics at Georgetown University, and to this
journal’s reviewers and editors for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions
of this article.
Several philosophers would endorse this claim, though some of them use a definition of ‘gratitude’ I
take to be synonymous with appreciation. See, for instance, Loder (2011). Cf. Swanton (1995).
43
21
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