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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Peter Nickl
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5542/2017.02.002
University of Regensburg, Hannover, Germany
Firstly, gratitude is shown to be an emotional element which completes every action: to act means risking not to bring about the intended end. When the action is successful, the actor will have a positive emotion which can be interpreted as gratitude. The case of ingratitude (see the fairy tale of “The Fisherman and His Wife”), lacking the final assent, illustrates that the action of the thankless person never comes to an end. Secondly, the thankless person can reach whatever she wants, but will never reach happiness. Finally, there is the problem of the role of gratitude when most things are done by machines, not by humans. The essay touches on the structural varieties of gratitude (monadic, dyadic, triadic) without being definitive.
gratitude, ingratitude, action theory, happiness, technical age
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