In this paper I present a novel taxonomy of envy, according to which there are four kinds of envy: emulative, inert, aggressive and spiteful envy. An inquiry into the varieties of envy is valuable not only to understand it as a psychological phenomenon, but also to shed light on the nature of its alleged viciousness. 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 behavioral tendencies of envy, which has 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, whose interplay is responsible for the existence of the four envies. 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. (shrink)

Across time and cultures, envy is widely regarded as a vice. This paper provides a theory of viciousness that explains why envy is a vice. First, it sketches an account of the trait of envy, utilizing some of the social psychology literature on social comparisons. Second, it considers some theories of vices—including Neo-Aristotelian, Kant’s, and Driver’s consequentialism—and briefly argues that they are not adequate in general or with regard to envy. Lastly it articulates a theory of viciousness on which a (...) trait’s degree of viciousness is determined by its disposition to produce actions and attitudes that are of disvalue; it then applies this theory to envy. (shrink)

The claim that ordinary ethical discourse is typically true and that ethical facts are typically knowable seems in tension with the claim that ordinary ethical discourse is about features of reality friendly to a scientific worldview. Cornell Realism attempts to dispel this tension by claiming that ordinary ethical discourse is, in fact, discourse about the same kinds of things that scientific discourse is about: natural properties. We offer two novel arguments in reply. First, we identify a key assumption that we (...) find unlikely to be true. Second, we identify two features of typical natural properties that ethical properties lack. We conclude that Cornell Realism falls short of dispelling the tension between ethical conservativism and ethical naturalism. (shrink)

Después de que Friedrich Nietzsche expusiera el fenómeno del resentimiento mediante un supuesto desenmascaramiento de un complejo emotivo oculto, autores posteriores, como Max Scheler y René Girard, matizaron el análisis nietzscheano aplicándolo a diversos ámbitos antropológicos y sociales. Muchas de las principales aportaciones de estos análisis contemporáneos encuentran sus precedentes en autores anteriores, modernos y medievales. Seis siglos y medio antes de Scheler, Tomás de Aquino ofrece en dos cuestiones de su Summa Theologiae dedicadas a la acedia y la envidia (...) una serie de precisiones conceptuales y observaciones psicológicas que coinciden en gran parte de su fondo y, en ocasiones, en la forma, con ciertas caracterizaciones del resentimiento. Demostramos, apoyándonos en numerosas referencias textuales, los paralelismos entre la fenomenología scheleriana del resentimiento y la exposición tomasiana de los vicios capitales. (shrink)