Varieties of envy

Abstract

In this paper I present a novel taxonomy of envy as a psychological state, according to which there are four kinds of envy: emulative, inert, aggressive, and spiteful envy. The first section introduces the intuition that there is more than one kind of envy, together with the anecdotal and linguistic evidence that supports it. The second section proposes and explains in detail a definition of envy tout court. The third section presents a recurring distinction between the behavioral tendencies of envy that have been explained in two distinct ways, one mostly proposed by psychologists, the other discernible in the philosophical tradition. The fourth section argues that these models of explanation track two variables—focus of concern and obtainability of the good—whose interplay is responsible for the existence of the four kinds of envy. The fifth section illustrates four paradigmatic cases and provides a detailed analysis of the phenomenology, motivational structure, and typical behavioral outputs of each. The paper ends with a brief discussion of the implications of the taxonomy for moral education.

Keywords:

• Emotions
• envy
• social comparison

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Stephen Campbell, Pamela Corcoran, Stephen Darwall, Verity Harte, June Gruber, Maria Miceli, and Tamar Szabó Gendler for detailed comments and discussions on this and previous versions of this paper. For helpful feedback and comment, I also thank Myisha Cherry, Eric Guindon, Shen-yi Liao, Andres Luco, Aaron Meskin, Dana Nelkin, Neil Sinhababu, several anonymous reviewers, and audience members at talks given at Davidson College, an Eastern APA colloquium, Nanyang Technological University, National University of Singapore, Simon Fraser University, University of California San Diego, University of Puget Sound, and Yale MAP.

Notes

1. Even though envy appears to be a universal emotion, its specific expressions may be quite different cross-culturally. The focus of this article is envy in the contemporary Western context. The historical references are all from the Western tradition. The psychological research cited is mostly based on samples drawn from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). The four kinds of envy described here are social constructs that are culturally specific, and I do not claim that they exhaust all the possible varieties of envy as they can be, or have been, experienced by human beings. Consequently, I do not discuss issues concerning the evolutionary history of envy. Thank you to two anonymous referees for prompting me to make these clarifications.

2. Notice that in this paper I adopt a secular perspective and set aside theological issues.

3. Francois de la Rochefoucauld famously wrote: “We can often be vain of our passions, even the guiltiest ones; but envy is so sneaking and shameful that we never dare confess it” (2008, p. 9). Plutarch (1959, number 5) and Mandeville (1924, “note N”) make a similar point, among others.

4. According to D’Arms, “the philosophical consensus is that these are distinct emotions” (2009, p. 3, section 1.2). See, for instance, Ben-Ze’ev (1990), Farrell (1980), Neu (1980), and Taylor (1988). A similar consensus can be found in psychology; see the reviews in Miceli and Castelfranchi (2007, pp. 471–473) and Smith and Kim (2007, pp. 47–48). In my view, the crucial difference between the two emotions is that the jealous is afraid of, and pained by, the possibility or actuality of losing a special relationship to a person, or a valued good, whereas the envious perceives herself to be in a position of disadvantage or inferiority because she lacks an object, a talent, a status, or the possibility of achieving a goal. Envy and jealousy are in this respect opposite attitudes: jealousy guards what envy covets (Foster, 1972, p. 168). This simple dichotomy of loss versus lack is a relatively established way of distinguishing between envy and jealousy, even though it is not free from complications (see Miceli & Castelfranchi, 2007, pp. 471–473). See, for instance, Parrott (1991), Parrott and Smith (1993), and Miceli and Castelfranchi (2007) among psychologists. See Ben-Ze’ev (1990), Purshouse (2004), and Konyndyk DeYoung (2009) among philosophers.

5. Dutch: benijden and afgunst, Polish: zazdros´c´ and zawis´c´, and Thai: (phonetically) ı`t-cha and rı´t-yaa, as documented in van de Ven, Zeelenberg, and Pieters (2009, p. 420). Hadi Jorati, whom I thank, told me that Arabic has similar terms: gibt and hasad. I am relying on native speakers’ testimony and my own consultation of the relevant dictionaries with regard to these distinctions.

6. I focus on psychology and philosophy, but envy is studied from a wide range of perspectives. See Smith (2008) for a comprehensive interdisciplinary review.

7. Especially among philosophers, such as Plato (Philebus 47d-50e), Aristotle (Rhetoric, II. 10), Hobbes (Leviathan, chapter 6), Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book II, chapter 20, §13), and Spinoza (Ethica, part 3, proposition 55, corollary). Among contemporaries, see Tai, Narayanan, and McAlllister (2012).

8. While this perception may be incorrect, either because the perceived lack is not actual, or because what one perceives as good is in fact bad, for simplicity I assume that the envier is always correct in her perceptions.

9. Hume makes both observations in the Treatise (II.2.8), but already Aristotle had recognized the similarity factor: “We feel [envy] towards our equals; … and by ‘equals’ I mean equals in birth, relationship, age, disposition, distinction, or wealth. … We envy those who are near us in time, place, age, or reputation. … So too we compete with those who follow the same ends as ourselves: we compete with our rivals in sport or in love, and generally with those who are after the same things; and it is therefore these whom we are bound to envy beyond all others. Hence the saying, Potter against potter” (Rhetoric, II. 10).

10. See Tesser and Collins (1988) and Tesser, Millar, and Moore (1988) for the self-evaluation maintenance (SEM) model of social behavior. See Salovey and Rodin (1984) and Salovey and Rothman (1991) among others for an application of this model to envy.

11. Very young children, who have not developed a well-defined sense of identity, experience envy across all domains, whereas older children express envy only in areas that they rated as self-defining (Bers & Rodin, 1984). In this paper I focus on adult envy.

12. There is a third option. Rather than trying to close the gap, one can cope with envy indirectly. A common strategy is to re-evaluate the object of envy and come to see it as not good for oneself. This is known as the sour grape strategy, from the famous Aesop’s fable: if I envy someone’s capacity to reach what seems like delicious fruit, I might cope with it by convincing myself that after all that fruit is not as delicious as it seems. This strategy need not be a form of self-deception, as in the fable: in its most successful instances it may involve a genuine and useful re-assessment of one’s values and goals. (See Exline & Zell, 2008 for a review of “antidotes” to envy in this sense.) This strategy, which dismisses the disadvantage either as only superficial or as irrelevant to one’s well-being, makes one’s envy inappropriate: if the good is not a genuine good, then there is no real inferiority or disadvantage. In this paper I focus on appropriate envy.

13. In the contemporary literature, Aaron Ben-Ze’ev has a similar notion of focus of concern (Ben-Ze’ev, 2002). Gabriele Taylor uses the notion of focus and that of leveling orientation to distinguish between kinds of envy (Taylor, 1988, 2006), but in a way that I find inadequate; see endnote 23. Jerome Neu (1980, pp. 433–434) uses focus of concern to distinguish between jealousy (where the focus is on the valued object) and envy (where the focus is on the rival), and not between what he calls admiring envy and malicious envy, which differ in leveling orientation. D’Arms and Kerr dismiss “focus of attention” as a discriminating factor between kinds of envy (2008, pp. 46–47). The authors conclude that focusing on the rival means being “bothered by” the fact that the rival has the good, which is a locution also used in Farrell (1980), but neither article spells out the notion fully.

14. My interpretation of zēlos is not uncontroversial. The term is generally translated in English as “emulation” or, more rarely, as “zeal,” and the corresponding emotion is often interpreted as one that differs in kind from envy (for instance see Kristjánsson, 2006). I believe that this reading is affected by the Scholastic interpretation of Aristotle (Perrine & Timpe, 2014, for instance, refer to Aristotelian zēlos when analyzing Aquinas’ account of envy and zeal). While this approach may be enlightening when thinking of envy as a capital sin, it seems anachronistic and misleading when interpreting the Aristotelian account of envy as an emotion. Aristotle presents zēlos and phthonos as emotions with a similar structure, both being pains at the sight of another’s good fortune. The different focus of concern is the only feature that Aristotle explicitly puts forward as distinguishing them (their opposite behavioral tendency is directly consequent to the different focus). Since focus of concern is often used by contemporary philosophers to differentiate different kinds of envy, and since both zēlos and phthonos satisfy a widely shared conception of envy as an emotion, it seems to me that we have good reason to conceptualize zēlos as a kind of envy, albeit not a vicious one. I thank an anonymous referee for encouraging me to address this hermeneutical question.

15. In psychology we find a discussion of the correlation between malicious and benign envy with “focus of attention” (Crusius & Lange, 2014), but the term is used differently than in the philosophical discussion. Here the term refers not to a determinant of envy that concerns the agent’s values, but rather what the agent pays attention to as a consequence of envy. The authors found that when agents feel benign envy, they tend to focus their attention on the envied good, and when they feel malicious envy, they tend to focus on the envied. This result is compatible with my taxonomy. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this reference.

16. See Lockwood and Kunda (1997) and Testa and Major (1990). Some philosophers also explain leveling orientation this way (Bacon, 2000; Rawls, 1971, p. 467).

17. Miceli and Castelfranchi (2007) and Smith and Kim (2007), however, do not consider benign envy (or, as Miceli and Castelfranchi call it, emulation) a form of envy proper. Van de Ven, Zeelenberg, and Pieters (2012) analyze the role of another factor, perceived deservingness of the outcome, and its interactions with perceived control. This paper accomplishes, among others, two important results: First, it further confirms the differences in appraisal and experience between benign envy and admiration. Second, it shows that when enviers perceive the superior situation of the envied as deserved, they tend to feel benign envy, whereas when they perceive it as undeserved, they feel malicious envy. I do not consider deservingness here because the interaction between control and deservingness needs further enquiry and it is not clear that they are independent variables. It is also not clear how perceived deservingness interacts with like or dislike of the envied. Van de Ven et al. speculate that when we do not like the envied, we tend to consider their fortune as less deserved. This seems right to me. I also think that disliking the envied correlates with an adversarial attitude, and thus a focus on the envied. It is possible that focus of concern may ultimately account for both perception of (un)deservingness of the outcome and (dis)like of the envied.

18. I am using the expression “for its own sake” somewhat loosely to indicate that the envier values the good independently from the fact that the envied has it. I intend this formulation to be compatible with the fact that envier might value the good because it is instrumental to achieve another good.

19. This is not a particularly idiosyncratic point: the doctrine of double effect is also based on the idea that we can distinguish between the content of our intended action and a foreseeable but contingently related side effect of our intended action.

20. There is no empirical work on the potential interactions between focus of concern and obtainability of the good, as far as I am aware. It is not clear to me the extent to which a notion such as focus of concern can be investigated empirically, at least with the conventional social psychology methodology. I thank an anonymous reviewer for prompting me to clarify this point.

21. By exemplary I mean most realistic and plausible characterization, rather than average or median. Therefore, the exemplary cases may be located in a different position in each quadrant, rather than being equidistant.

22. The envier’s name in this and the following vignettes starts with the first syllables of the corresponding kind of envy.

23. Other philosophers who talk of emulative envy are Gabriele Taylor and John Rawls. Taylor (2006) defines emulative envy as focused on the rival, but with an orientation to level up, and calls envy that is focused on the rival but with an orientation to level down “destructive envy.” She provides no explanation as to why a subject focused on the rival can come to feel one or the other. She calls “admiring envy” a kind of envy that is focused on the good, but it is not clear how that emotion differs from admiration proper. John Rawls’s definition of emulative envy is closer to mine in that it motivates us to strive to get the good for ourselves “in socially beneficial ways” (1971, p. 467). It is not clear in the text how emulative envy differs from what he calls “benign envy,” which he explicitly sets apart both from emulative envy and envy “proper,” that is, malicious envy. Of the latter, he says it is connected to a sense of defeat and failure, thus implicitly recognizing the low-control factor, but he does not articulate this intuition.

24. In evolutionary psychology terms, emulative envy is adaptive (Hill & Buss, 2008). Self-improvement may also be only partially successful: the envier may get better without reaching the level of the envied. Different emotional states can ensue: Emma may come to feel inert envy, which involves the perception of the good as unattainable; she may become more focused on the envied, and come to feel aggressive or spiteful envy; she may re-evaluate the good (e.g., “I don’t after all care about being an excellent philosopher”), reassess her position (e.g., “I am not as bad as I thought I was”—this would probably require an act of self-deception by now), or reassess the relevant comparison class (e.g., “Diotima is much better than me”), in which case she may feel admiration.

25. A Google search on “baby envy” leads to dozens of articles and blog posts reporting stories analogous to the one I tell here: see for instance Klein (2013).

26. Shame and guilt are neither necessary nor unusual components of any kind of envy, but they are presumably more likely in inert envy, where the envier does not see the target as someone to bring down, and where confabulatory pretenses of injustice may be less frequent.

27. In societies where resources are scarce, the implicit assumption is that any compliment implies some degree of malicious envy. Therefore compliments are feared, and etiquette rules prohibit making them. In the same societies, one not only avoids boasting one’s good fortune, but goes as far as hiding it (cf., soiling the newborn babies’ faces with mud, minimizing or denying the qualities of one’s children, hiding one’s wealth, and so forth) in order to avoid the scary and dangerous “evil eye” of the enviers (Foster, 1972; Lindholm, 2008).

28. Susan Fiske and collaborators, working on intergroup envy, have shown that envied groups are perceived by enviers as highly competent, but cold. Detachment and dehumanization of envied groups have serious social and moral consequences (Fiske, 2011; Harris, Cikara, & Fiske, 2008). Similar considerations seem to apply to envy for individuals. Notice also that liking a person, which implies warmth and seeing that individual as a person, is likely to diminish envy (Smith, 2000, pp. 177, 183).

29. Foster (1972) and Smith and Kim (2007) discuss compliments as expressions of envy but do not connect them with frustrated intention to level up. Miceli (2012, p. 40) presents some funny and appropriate examples of backhanded compliments. She does not, however, discuss their implications for the structure of envy. Backhanded compliments seem to be straightforward expressions of poorly disguised hostility and do not necessarily imply appreciation of the envied good.

30. In some cases the envied may indeed be causally, even though not morally, responsible for the envier’s disadvantage. In that case, I suspect that the envier will be more likely to become focused on the target and experience either aggressive or spiteful envy.

31. An anonymous reviewer suggests that inert envy may in fact be what others refer to as covetousness. In Roberts (2003), for instance, covetousness, while not defined explicitly, is said to imply the awareness that the desired object belongs to another person, without any rivalry or competitiveness. Rather, “the focus may overwhelmingly be on the thing desired” (Roberts, 2003, p. 262). This notion of covetousness, however, differs from inert envy in that it does not include perceived control over the outcome, which is responsible for inert envy’s “sulking” tendency and ultimately self-defeating character. A glimpse of the unproductive nature of inert envy may be found in the characterization of covetousness by Konyndyk DeYoung (2009, p. 43). One of the examples of covetousness she provides is the Biblical story of Ahab and Naboth as related in 1 Kings 2–4 (NIV): “Ahab said to Naboth, ‘Let me have your vineyard to use for a vegetable garden, since it is close to my palace. In exchange I will give you a better vineyard or, if you prefer, I will pay you whatever it is worth.’ But Naboth replied, ‘The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my ancestors.’ So Ahab went home, sullen and angry. … He lay on his bed sulking and refused to eat.” However, her other example of covetousness (of which she does not provide a definition) is that of Kind David, who covets Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba. Given that this desire motivates David to send Uriah to die so that he can have Bathsheba, the emotion here at stake might rather be aggressive envy. Hence, Konyndyk DeYoung’s notion of covetousness does not correspond to inert envy either. Dictionary definitions of covetousness are also unhelpful, because they either refer to the general intense desire to possess an object belonging to someone else (which can be a component of many emotions) or to a necessarily immoral kind of desire, akin to greed, that makes use of the term more suitable to a theological discussion of a sin than to a philosophical analysis of kinds of envy.

32. The vignette is loosely inspired by the second season of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

33. It may be argued that admiration is a morally superior response. Whether that is the case depends partly on issues that I cannot face here (concerning the nature of the good and what counts as morally appropriate) and partly on whether admiration can arise in the contexts in which envy arises, that is, circumstances in which comparison to the other person reflects badly on oneself. If admiration cannot arise in those circumstances (as the results from van de Ven, Zeelenberg, & Pieters, 2009 suggest), and if ought implies can, then emulative envy may be the only morally appropriate response. I devote more attention to the normative implications of my taxonomy in my (2015) manuscript "What is Bad About Envy?". Thank you to an anonymous referee for asking me to address this possibility.