Tonstad asks whether a person’s experience of gratitude is determined internally or externally; put otherwise, do we choose to be grateful for the good that it will do us, or is gratitude a spontaneous response to the good outside of our control? Tonstad faults the popular effort–reward and cause–effects accounts of gratitude, which cultivate gratitude for its own sake, for failing to acknowledge the gratuity of gratitude, with its basis in the undeserved and uncontrollable nature of the gift, whilst ignoring the conditions of injustice that allow for one’s experience of gratitude.