Gratitude's Fitting Growth

Philosophical discussion of gratitude tends to emphasize the way in which the emotion is responsive to manifestations of benevolence (or good will). In some cases, however, gratitude “grows” or increases in strength across time in ways that are intuitively fitting but unaccounted for by gratitude’s sensitivity to benevolence. To make sense of this kind of gratitude growth, I argue that there are conditions under which manifestations of benevolence—particularly, benevolent hopes—can rationally accommodate the unforeseen and unintended outcomes to which they give rise, rendering fitting a greater degree of gratitude than was fitting in response to the original manifestations of benevolence.

• Publication year

  2026

• Venue

  Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy

• Publication date

  2026-02-25

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.26556/jesp.v31i1.3501
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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