 Kant’s worries about obligations of gratitude in the Lectures on Ethics may be overstated. For one thing, it may well be possible to discharge an obligation of gratitude, if by this we mean get back on equal footing with a benefactor. A beneficiary might one day bestow an act of benevolence for a stranger, only to find out after the fact that the stranger was a benefactor of his from long ago. Here, the beneficiary has benefited his benefactor, and has done it not as any sort of reaction, but with the same sort of original proactive benevolence that motivated the original benefactor’s benevolence in the first place. Furthermore, even if it may be impossible ever to “pay off” an obligation of gratitude, it is usually not especially difficult to avoid violating any such obligations, especially if the original favor was small (Hewitt 1924). A beneficiary need not shape his life around respecting his obligations of gratitude, insofar as living up to those obligations might require only occasional minor return favors on his part. Sacred duties of gratitude, then, need not be as burdensome as Kant originally suggested. And indeed, Kant himself seemed to soften his claims about accepting favors and the psychological effects of being under an obligation of gratitude. In the Doctrine of Virtue, he noted that while it may be natural to feel shamed at being made a beneficiary, this shame is not rationally justified, and it results from a misunderstanding of the legitimate sources of one’s moral worth (Smit and Timmons 2011).