Title: Gratitudeworthiness without Praiseworthiness
Abstract: It seems a truism that if a person is gratitudeworthy for φ-ing, she is also pro tanto morally praiseworthy for φ-ing, i.e., worthy of either moral esteem for φ-ing or such that she non-accidentally φ-ed for sufficient moral reason to φ. Call this the Gratitude-Praise Link (GPL). I argue that people can act in a variety of ways that make them fitting targets of gratitude but not moral praise. Moreover, these intuitive results dovetail with plausible views about the different primary functions of gratitude and attitudes of moral praise (e.g., approbation or admiration) as well as the motivational profiles that are partially constitutive of gratitude and attitudes of moral praise, respectively. Together, we can see that gratitude and attitudes of moral praise belong to distinct (but often overlapping) phenomena. This result also puts pressure on several related commonplaces: (i) resentment, as gratitude’s counterpart, is an attitude of moral blame, (ii) all reactive attitudes are fitting responses to goodwill, and (iii) perspectivalism about reactive attitudes.
