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Understanding Gratitude As Both a Virtue and a Duty

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Understanding Gratitude As Both a Virtue and a Duty University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2019 The Dual Nature of Gratitude: Understanding Gratitude as Both a Virtue and a Duty Mary Helen Brickhouse University of Tennessee, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Brickhouse, Mary Helen, "The Dual Nature of Gratitude: Understanding Gratitude as Both a Virtue and a Duty. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2019. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/5337 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Mary Helen Brickhouse entitled "The Dual Nature of Gratitude: Understanding Gratitude as Both a Virtue and a Duty." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Philosophy. Adam Cureton, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Jon Garthoff, Kristina Gehrman, Allen Dunn Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) The Dual Nature of Gratitude: Understanding Gratitude as Both a Virtue and a Duty A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Mary Helen Brickhouse May 2019 Acknowledgments First, I would like to acknowledge my committee and most notably Adam Cureton. Somehow, through my inarticulate ramblings about egg donation and gratitude, Adam understood what I was trying to say, and he helped me piece together these seemingly random ideas into a dissertation. I am sure it was exhausting to spend two years reading new “drafts” of a single chapter that were totally different from the “draft” before. He just let me restart as many times as I wanted and then, at the end, helped give me a structure so I could begin to combine all those old drafts into shiny new chapters. So thank you, Adam, for your flexibility and guidance and for somehow knowing what I needed when I needed it. It also important that I acknowledge my husband, Devon. Devon has also been my sounding board through the whole process. Being married to a philosopher is fun but it is especially useful when you are trying to think through fine-grained distinctions or figure out the best way to structure a chapter. So Devon, thank you for being willing to stop what you are doing to help me think through pretty much every aspect of this dissertation. My parents have, of course, been two of my biggest cheerleaders. My mom has been interested in talking about gratitude and has even made an effort to adopt the gratitude/thankfulness distinction in everyday language. My dad, always the philosopher, spends his time trying to think of counterexamples or hard cases to throw at me. The section on whether we owe gratitude to dead people came out of a conversation we had sitting by the fire after my grandma passed away. Even apart from that, they have supported me by getting me out of the house by getting me out onto the Blackwater Creek Trail to walk (with my mom) or run (with my dad), inviting us over for dinner, or taking us up to the property. Mom and Dad, thank you for everything you have done to get me to this finish line. ii I also want to thank my brother and my friends. William is always up for playing games. When I was in the library stressing over some problem in my dissertation, he would come over and we would go for a walk (but mostly play PokemonGo). On the weekends he would be ready to play Mansions or D&D. All I had to do was call (because he may or may not answer my texts…). Playing games is a release for me so I appreciate his willingness to play with me. In the same vein, I want to thank my friends both in Lynchburg and Knoxville who are always there to play with me when I need a break! Sarah and Caroline. I love you both so much! Without you, I would never have thought much about gratitude at all. Thinking about you kept me pushing forward. Finally, I want to thank all those people who I have talked to about gratitude. The graduate students at UT, especially Jordan, Naomi, and Alex, were always happy to help me develop a case or help me think through some problem. Everyone who came to my Sunday school class on gratitude introduced me to alternate (and sometimes conflicting) ways of understanding gratitude. That really helped me to figure out what I think and to approach gratitude from different directions. Last but not least, I want to acknowledge all the strangers who wanted to talk with me about gratitude. Those conversations, while not always directly helpful to my project, introduced me to the many different pre-philosophical intuitions that people have about gratitude. Those experiences helped me to narrow down precisely what I am worried about and how my interests may or may not align with what the average person sees as most important about gratitude. iii Abstract We all understand what it means when someone says they are grateful. Sometimes they are describing something internal such as a feeling or an attitude towards something. Other times they are describing an act of gratitude such as a return favor. Sometimes they express gratitude for a state of affairs. Other times they express gratitude to a person for providing some benefit to them. Yet we can always piece together what is being communicated. The problem, however, is that these various ways of describing gratitude pull us in opposite directions and it is not obvious how these descriptions all relate back to the same concept. In this dissertation I first attempt to distinguish gratitude from other closely related concepts such as thankfulness or appreciation. I suggest that gratitude is always directed to a benefactor while the object of thankfulness is a state of affairs. Even if we agree that gratitude is directed to a benefactor for some benefit, does the gratitude take the form of a feeling or a duty to act? It is not immediately clear. I suggest that gratitude is best understood as both a virtue and a duty because the content of virtue is best understood, at least in part, in terms of principles. The principles of gratitude help us to distinguish gratitude from other closely related virtues such as justice or generosity, but we can only fully understand the virtue of gratitude by appealing to the ideal of gratitude. The ideal of gratitude involves more than merely acting on the right principles. It involves acting on the right principles in the right way, at the right time, and knowing when certain principles do or do not apply. At the end of the dissertation I apply this account of gratitude to a difficult case involving egg donation between sisters. In doing so I show how this view of gratitude is able to capture many of our intuitions about gratitude in a coherent and unified way. iv Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction ...............................................................................1 Why Gratitude? ............................................................................................................... 3 An Overview of the Dissertation .................................................................................... 4 Chapter 2: Historical Conceptions of Gratitude ........................................8 What is Gratitude? .......................................................................................................... 9 How Do You Express Gratitude? ................................................................................. 19 How to Be a Good Benefactor. ..................................................................................... 23 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 29 Chapter 3: Gratitude, Thankfulness, and Appreciation .........................30 Two Structures of Gratitude .......................................................................................... 31 What Lurks Behind Both Thankfulness and Gratitude ................................................. 44 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 45 Chapter 4: The Dual Nature of Gratitude ................................................47 Two Views of Gratitude ................................................................................................ 48 The Dual Nature of Gratitude ....................................................................................... 58 Chapter 5: When is Gratitude a Required Response? ............................73 Must R Have j’d Intentionally? ................................................................................... 75 Must the Beneficiary Be Benefitted? ............................................................................ 77 Whether Y Wants or Accepts R’s j-ing ....................................................................... 79 v Does j Have to Be an Action? ....................................................................................
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