The envious mind

Abstract

This work provides an analysis of the basic cognitive components of envy. In particular, the roles played by the envious party's social comparison with, and ill will against, the better off are emphasised. The ill will component is characterised by the envier's ultimate goal or wish that the envied suffer some harm, and is distinguished from resentment and sense of injustice, which have often been considered part of envy. The reprehensible nature of envy is discussed, and traced back to the analysis of its components. Finally, we explore both points of overlap and distinguishing features between envy and other emotions such as jealousy or emulation, and make a few general remarks, pointing to the necessity of overcoming conceptual looseness in the notion of envy.

Acknowledgments

Preparation of this paper was in part supported by HUMAINE (European Project IST- 507422).

We wish to dedicate this paper to the memory of John Sabini. We are grateful to Ursula Hess and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹We owe this suggestion to an anonymous reviewer.

²The evolutionary perspective could be enlightening with regard to the problem of ultimate ill will because it provides a “deeper”, or in any case different, level of analysis: the functional one, which tries to explain the psychological mechanisms that evolved to solve adaptive problems—such as escaping dangers and predators, finding food, shelter and protection, finding mates, being accepted and appreciated among one's conspecifics—and thus surviving and delivering one's genes to one's own offspring. From this perspective, emotions serve to generate goals our ancestors had to pursue in order to answer recurrent ecological demands (e.g., Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). And, of course, the instrumental relation between such emotion-generated goals and their functions was far from being represented in our forefathers’ minds.

³To be sure, we do not propose that jealousy necessarily implies an objective (i.e., socially acknowledged) sense of injustice. Though this might be true in some cases (think of the norms regulating marriage and “committed” relationships), in other cases the jealous party can hardly justify their feeling by invoking any socially shared norm. Moreover, the jealous party also has to deal with the (more or less) shared conviction that “no one has the right to be loved”. However, we are supposing that in any case jealousy implies a subjective and very basic sense of injustice. The latter is grounded in a “primitive” rule—a sort of norm of usucaption—that says: “What I already have (i.e., whatever is “mine”) is my due”. Although of course this “norm” is often questionable on objective grounds, we assume that it establishes a “right” that is subjectively felt as such by the jealous party. When violated, it elicits a resentment that, although not necessarily sanctioned and legitimate, is still resentment (and not mere ill will). That is, we view the sense of injustice of jealousy as that sense of injustice, which has been (in our view improperly) attributed to envy, as long as it is characterised by being personally valid but socially inappropriate (or not necessarily appropriate).