Gratitude and believing in someone

Abstract

I aim to vindicate the claim that we can owe someone gratitude for believing in us and to show how this seemingly prosaic fact has important upshots for the normativity of gratitude. I start by sketching a novel account of what it is to believe in someone according to which it consists in holding an affective attitude of confident optimism toward their general ability in some domain(s). I then argue that people can deserve gratitude for holding this attitude. I close by showing how the possibility of being gratitudeworthy for believing in someone casts down on three commonplaces about when gratitude is owed.