Jordan Walters (McGill University) “The Aptness of Envy”
American Journal of Political Science, 2023
Are demands for equality motivated by envy? Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, and Nozick all thought so.[1] Call this the Envy Objection. For egalitarians, the Envy Objection is meant to sting. It stings because envy seems unreasonable. After all, as Rawls put it, envy is the “propensity to view with hostility the greater good of others even though their being more fortunate than we are does not detract from our advantages.”[2]
It is no wonder, then, that many egalitarians have tried to evade the Envy Objection. Yet the charge that egalitarianism is envy incarnate is not merely an academic one; it routinely appears in public discourse. For instance, in 2012, Mitt Romney spoke about the “bitter politics of envy” to Matt Lauer:
Lauer: I’m curious about the word ‘envy.’ Did you suggest that anyone who questions the policies and practices of Wall Street and financial institutions, anyone who has questions about the distribution of wealth and power in this country, is envious? Is it about jealousy, or fairness?
Romney: You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare (Sorkin 2012).
If Romney has one thing in common with egalitarians, it is a shared worry about envy in politics. But should egalitarians be worried about envy? In “The Aptness of Envy” I argue that egalitarians should stop worrying and learn to love envy. I argue that the persistent unwillingness to embrace the charge that demands for equality are motivated by envy is rooted in a common misunderstanding of the nature of the charge, what it reveals, and what can be said in response to it.
So what exactly is the argument behind the Envy Objection? Despite its ubiquity, proponents of it rarely spell out why it is supposed to be an objection to egalitarianism. It is not clear, for instance, whether the Envy Objection is the conclusion of an argument or a premise within an argument. I clarify this by situating the Envy Objection as a particular species of a debunking argument, which I call the Envy Debunking Argument:
(P1) S’s belief in egalitarian principles is solely motivated by envy.
(P2) Beliefs motivated solely by envy do not provide an appropriate justification for beliefs.
(C) Therefore, S’s belief in egalitarian principles is unjustified.
What to make of the Envy Debunking Argument? I think many are inclined to accept the second premise and deny the first. This is because they think that appraisals about equality that are motivated by envy seem to be fundamentally misguided because they conflict with the principles guiding objective inquiry into justice. Like lovers blinded by their love, enviers become blinded by their envy—or so the Envy Debunking Argument tells us.
I take a different tack. I think we ought to grant the first premise and deny the second. I argue that envy is fitting—or apt—with respect to its object when the object is in fact enviable; and something is enviable when (i) the envier and the rival stand in the right relation, (ii) the difference in possession is bad for the envier, and (iii) the badness is explained by a lack of certain positional goods connected to inferior status.
What follows from the claim that there are cases of apt envy? I take it that we might turn the Envy Debunking Argument on its head and provide a vindicatory story about the relationship between egalitarianism and envy.[3] For if certain positional goods are enviable, then it does not immediately follow that a belief solely motivated by envy fails to track the truth. On the contrary, when envy is fitting, it is a way of apprehending positional goods related to inferior status. And if these goods are enviable, then it follows that proponents of the Envy Objection are guilty of launching a critique which misses the mark because it smuggles in a negative epistemic upshot to a bare psychological claim.
There’s a dialectical upshot to all this: insofar as the critic remains unpersuaded by the argument in this paper, they should recognize a need to reframe the quarrel between egalitarians and those who claim that their views are motivated by envy. Instead of asking whether egalitarian intuitions are motivated by envy, both parties to the debate should be asking: is it ever apt to feel envy?
Here’s an open-access link to “The Aptness of Envy” (American Journal of Political Science): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajps.12805
References
D’Arms, Justin, and Alison Duncan Kerr. 2010. “Envy in the Philosophical Tradition.” In Envy: Theory and Research, ed. Richard H. Smith, 39–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1921/1949. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. New York: Liverwright.
Frye, Harrison. 2016. “The Relation of Envy to Distributive Justice.” Social Theory and Practice 42 (3): 501–24.
Hayek, F. A. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2008. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sorkin, Amy Davidson. 2012. “Mitt Romney’s Resentment.” The New Yorker, September 18, 2012.
Srinivasan, Amia. 2018. “The Aptness of Anger.” Journal of Political Philosophy 26 (2): 123–44.
Srinivasan, Amia. 2019. “Genealogy, Epistemology and Worldmaking.” Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society CXIX (February): 127–56.
Williams, Bernard. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[1] See Nietzsche (1887/2008) as cited in D’Arms and Kerr (2010, 59, n.12), Freud (1921/1949, 120) as cited in D’Arms (2017), Hayek (1960, 91) as cited in Frye (2016, 501), and Nozick (1974, 240).
[2] See Rawls (1971: 446) as cited in Frye (2016, 504).
[3] See Williams (2002, 256) as cited in Srinivasan (2019, 129). Cf. Srinivasan (2018).