Recognizing A Fuller Range of Moral Distinctions (part 1 of 2)

In the course of discussions bearing on -- or even just straying into -- moral matters, you'll often hear people involved in them invoking and using a rather limited range of moral terms and concepts.  It can be ordinary everyday conversations between friends, family or co-workers.  At the other end of the scale, it might be talking heads corralled into boxes to debate each other with sound-bites on the television screen.  It can even be an Ethics class, or some other class straying into that territory

The most commonly used terms and concepts are the permissible, the obligatory, or the prohibited.  There's a host of synonyms available for these.  You can even describe them through terms like: what's allowed, what's required, and what's not allowed.  These are indeed important for moral life, decision-making, and development -- but where, I'd like to argue, a lot of people go wrong in in thinking that these three classifications provide an adequate range for the moral distinctions we need to make.

What Does Gratitude Require?

There's a marked tendency to talk a lot about "gratitude" these days.  In fact, usually springboarding off an oft-quoted passage by Cicero, namely that "gratitude is not only the greatest of the virtues, but the parent of them" -- and then never engaging with Cicero's thought again after that -- there's even quite a lot of buzz about gratitude in terms of virtue ethics, or at least what we might call "virtue-lite morality."  There's also a rising and somewhat paradoxical tendency to focus on the positive effects of gratitude on the life, the attitude, even the physical health of the grateful person.

I wonder myself at times whether we really ought to include "gratitude" among the virtues, or whether --  as I've argued elsewhere about forgiveness -- we ought instead better regard it as something connected with and flowing from virtues, but not actually a virtue in its own right.  That's a topic on which I admittedly need to do more thinking.  But, one thing I have been reflecting upon quite a bit lately, is what gratitude ought to look like.  Or, you might say, how far it ought to extend in attitude and action, if it is really to be gratitude.