 Reasons aside, philosophers are also concerned with the way in which grateful behavior is actuated. Several philosophers argue that a grateful beneficiary must be “naturally inclined” to benefit his benefactor (Wellman 1999b) and will do so spontaneously (Camenisch 1981). On this view, a beneficiary who has to deliberate about whether to act gratefully, and then exert an effort of will to act on the outcome of his deliberation, falls short of gratitude. There may be room to question whether grateful behavior must always flow from natural inclination, however. Consider an analogy with friendship. We expect a good friend to be naturally inclined to help a friend in need; but sometimes, a person may need to muster an effort of will to come to his friend’s aid—specifically, when and if his first-order natural inclinations to help his friend are overwhelmed. This will happens inevitably even to the best of friends at times, since even the best of friends will have other legitimate commitments, interests and desires that might sometimes outweigh their natural inclination to come to the aide of a friend (Telfer 1970–1971; Owens 2012). By the same token, it can be argued that even the most grateful of beneficiaries will sometimes find their inclinations to benefit a benefactor overwhelmed by competing legitimate inclinations (Manela 2015). A beneficiary might have to muster an effort of will, for instance, to pull himself away from his daughter’s birthday party in order to help a benefactor in need. But exerting an effort of will in such cases need not be inconsistent with being grateful, just as exerting an effort of will to help a friend under similar circumstances would not make one a bad friend. The friendship analogy suggests, then, that acting spontaneously on first-order natural inclinations is not always necessary for an act to count as an act of gratitude.