The Moral Psychology of Envy

258 Pages·2022·2.291 MB·English

by  Sara Protasi (editor)

The Moral Psychology
of Envy
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS
Series Editor: Mark Alfano, Macquarie University
How do our emotions influence our other mental states (perceptions, beliefs,
motivations, intentions) and our behavior? How are they influenced by our
other mental states, our environments, and our cultures? What is the moral
value of a particular emotion in a particular context? This series explores the
causes, consequences, and value of the emotions from an interdisciplinary
perspective. Emotions are diverse, with components at various levels
(biological, neural, psychological, social), so each book in this series is
devoted to a distinct emotion. This focus allows the author and reader to
delve into a specific mental state, rather than trying to sum up emotions en
masse. Authors approach a particular emotion from their own disciplinary
angle (e.g., conceptual analysis, feminist philosophy, critical race theory,
phenomenology, social psychology, personality psychology, neuroscience)
while connecting with other fields. In so doing, they build a mosaic for each
emotion, evaluating both its nature and its moral properties.
Other titles in this series:
The Moral Psychology of Anger, edited by Myisha Cherry and
Owen Flanagan
The Moral Psychology of Contempt, edited by Michelle Mason
The Moral Psychology of Compassion, edited by Justin Caouette and
Carolyn Price
The Moral Psychology of Disgust, edited by Nina Strohminger and
Victor Kumar
The Moral Psychology of Gratitude, edited by Robert Roberts and
Daniel Telech
The Moral Psychology of Admiration, edited by Alfred Archer and
André Grahle
The Moral Psychology of Regret, edited by Anna Gotlib
The Moral Psychology of Hope, edited by Claudia Blöser and Titus Stahl
The Moral Psychology of Amusement, edited by Brian Robinson
The Moral Psychology of Boredom, edited by Andreas Elpidorou
The Moral Psychology of Love, edited by Berit Brogaard and
Arina Pismenny
The Moral Psychology of Hate, edited by Noell Birondo
The Moral Psychology of Envy, edited by Sara Protasi
The Moral
Psychology of Envy
Edited by Sara Protasi
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Protasi, Sara, 1978- editor.
Title: The moral psychology of envy / edited by Sara Protasi.
Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2022] | Series: Moral
psychology of the emotions | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022018680 (print) | LCCN 2022018681 (ebook) | ISBN
9781538160060 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538160077 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Envy. | Envy--Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC BF575.E65 M67 2022 (print) | LCC BF575.E65 (ebook) |
DDC 152.4/8--dc23/eng/20220621
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018680
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018681
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Introduction: Striving to Be Better, Sulking in a Corner, Stealing
the Spotlight, Spoiling Someone’s Joy: The Many Faces of Envy 1
Sara Protasi
Chapter 1: A Sociocultural Perspective on Envy: On Covetous
Desire, the Evil Eye, and the Social Regulation of Equality 23
Patricia M. Rodriguez Mosquera
Chapter 2: How Envy and Being Envied Shape Social Hierarchies 41
Jens Lange and Jan Crusius
Chapter 3: On the Epistemic Effects of Envy in Academia 61
Felipe Romero
Chapter 4: “I Could Have Been You”: Existential Envy and the Self 77
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran
Chapter 5: Envy, Compassion, and the Buddhist (No)Self 93
Christina Chuang
Chapter 6: Let the Donkeys Be Donkeys: In Defense of Inspiring
Envy 111
Maria Silvia Vaccarezza and Ariele Niccoli
Chapter 7: Malicious Moral Envy 129
Vanessa Carbonell
Chapter 8: “You’re Just Jealous!”: On Envious Blame 147
Neal A. Tognazzini
Chapter 9: The Fact of Envy: Trends in the History of Modern
Economics 163
Miriam Bankovsky
v
vi Contents
Chapter 10: The Politics of Envy: Outlaw Emotions in Capitalist
Societies 181
Alfred Archer, Alan Thomas, and Bart Engelen
Chapter 11: To Envy an Algorithm 199
Alison Duncan Kerr
Chapter 12: The Envious Consumer 217
Niels van de Ven
Index 237
About the Contributors 247
Introduction
Striving to Be Better, Sulking in a
Corner, Stealing the Spotlight, Spoiling
Someone’s Joy: The Many Faces of Envy
Sara Protasi
A tiny child is eating a huge ice cream: a big crunchy waffle replete with
smooth, bright-colored yumminess melting quickly in the summer heat. Their
little chubby fingers get wet, and the caretaker’s impatient call to hurry up
only makes the child clumsier—in a fatal second, the cone slips from the
child’s grip and falls face-down on the dirty pavement.
The child’s cry resonates in the torrid air, far-reaching in the neighborhood,
a moment that will consolidate into a sad childhood memory through numer-
ous retellings. Behind a fence, a peeking face turns from intensely yearning
and covetous to smiling with schadenfreude: “ah, that serves them right! If I
can’t have ice cream, why should other children?” the little voyeur’s expres-
sion suggests.
Envy is the malignant gaze, the evil eye that mars other people’s good
fortune, a blight of relations and ruin of societies—so the common think-
ing goes, shaped by millennia of religious and cultural condemnation of
this emotion.
That common thinking shaped how I thought about envy when I was a
child myself: I feared this deadly sin, seeing it as a corrupting force to be
repressed, denied, and hidden at all costs, except in the secrecy of the confes-
sional. I could have never admitted envy, even to my best friend—especially
to my best friend, who might have been the target of it!1
1
2 Introduction
But when I started thinking about envy years later, as a graduate student,
I realized that envy had propelled me to achieve worthy objectives and meet
high expectations. I remembered how, as a passionate but mediocre dance
student, envy for superior peers had motivated me to practice more intel-
ligently and effortfully. Those better dancers had shown me both that I could
improve myself and how I could do it. (And no, in case you were wondering,
that wasn’t just admiration!)2
My personal experience fueled an intellectual journey through historical
accounts of this emotion and lead to the discovery that it had been unjustly
maligned . . .
ENVY IS SAID IN MANY WAYS, IN
DIFFERENT TRADITIONS
As I looked into the envy literature in philosophy and psychology, I discov-
ered that some scholars had come to the same conclusion: that envy wasn’t
necessarily vicious, counterproductive, or irrational. In both fields, these
dissenting voices argued that envy could be emulative and benign, lead-
ing to self-betterment and achievement, void of malice or hostility toward
the envied.
In philosophy, this minority view had existed for a long time, arguably
since Aristotle’s discussion of phthonos and zēlos in Rhetoric (II.10–11).
Aristotle defines these two emotions as pains felt at the good fortune of oth-
ers who are perceived as equals. But phthonos is concerned with the other’s
success, rather than with the possibility of acquiring the lacked good, while
zēlos is concerned with the good itself, which agents see as obtainable and
deserved. Consequently, phthonos is a despicable emotion felt by ignoble
people bent on stopping others from having and enjoying goodness, while
zēlos is a noble emotion that motivates to pursue excellence.
The distinction between these two emotions has been exaggerated, in my
view, by commentators of Aristotle’s, especially Christian (e.g., Aquinas) but
also modern ones, who, in their eagerness to reject envy, have interpreted
zēlos (often translated as “emulation,” not an emotion term at all) as dif-
ferent in kind from phthonos (always translated as “envy”). (For a longer
discussion, see Protasi 2021, esp. 169–73.) Several philosophers in history
(e.g., Descartes, Hobbes, and Butler) have talked about envy and emulation,
but few have defended envy qua envy.3 In the contemporary debate, some
concede that envy is hostile toward the envied but reject the implication
that this hostility is always harmful, because envy helps to recognize and
redress injustice (La Caze 2001 and Frye 2016), while others argue that envy
is excusable or reasonable (Green 2013 and Bankovsky 2018, both after
Introduction 3
Rawls 1971). Krista Thomason (2015) vindicates the moral value of feeling
envy, independently from its consequences, while Gabriele Taylor (1988,
2006) distinguishes between three kinds of envy (admiring, emulative, and
destructive), thus joining Aristotle in recognizing that envy has subtypes.
Many philosophical accounts of envy, however (with the notable exception
of Aaron Ben-Ze’ev work, e.g., 1990, 2000) haven’t engaged much with con-
temporary empirical discussions.
While influential texts appeared in sociology, anthropology, and psychol-
ogy in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Schoeck 1969; Foster 1972; Silver and
Sabini 1978), a systematic empirical investigation of envy, especially in social
psychology, started in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., see works authored collab-
oratively and individually by W. Gerrod Parrott, Judith Rodin, Peter Salovey,
and Richard H. Smith). The 2000s saw another increase in scholarly interest
in envy (see figure 0.1, panel a). However, compared to other self-conscious
emotions such as shame, guilt, and embarrassment, envy remains relatively
underexplored, as shown in figure 0.1, panel b.4
The last two decades’ boom in the study of envy coincided with the rising
popularity of benign envy. A notion of nonmalicious or admiring envy could
already be found in some of the aforementioned early classics (Foster 1972;
Silver and Sabini 1978; Parrott 1991). But as recently as 2007, two authorita-
tive reviews still concurred with each other that benign envy could only be a
“weak” (Miceli and Castelfranchi 2007, 456) and “sanitized” (Smith and Kim
2007, 47) version of envy proper, insofar as it lacked what was deemed the
essential feature of ill-will toward the envied. As such, accepting the notion
of benign envy risked “obscur[ing] the nature of envy” (Smith and Kim 2007,
47) with the consequence of “missing the important differences between
envy and admiration or emulation” (Miceli and Castelfranchi 2007, 475). But
Niels van de Ven and collaborators’ germinal studies (2009, 2011) disrupted
this consensus, and the tide has turned since. The notion of benign envy, qua
genuine envy, has become much more mainstream, even though space for
debate remains (e.g., see the adversarial review by Crusius et al. 2020).
DISSENTING VOICES MEET IN THE
MIDDLE, SOMEWHAT ELEVATED
I was writing my dissertation during those transitional years (2010–2014), so
I witnessed this momentous shift with excitement. But even as I appreciated
the empirical vindication of my intuitions and life experiences, I noticed how
philosophical references in psychology articles were sparse and often only
present in the introductory section. Much like philosophy theorized about a
psychological phenomenon without delving deeply in the scientific evidence,