Chapter 4 - Love and Envy, Two Sides of the Same Coin

Summary

This chapter challenges the notion that love and envy are incompatible and argues that love and envy are compatible in at least two senses: first, they thrive in the same psychological conditions and thus are likely to occur together; second, love can benefit from emulative envy, and, when love is wise, it can tolerate some amount of inert, aggressive, and spiteful envy. The descriptive version of the incompatibility thesis (namely that love and envy never co-exist) is shown to be too strong and dismissed. The normative version of the incompatibility thesis (namely that love and envy ought not to co-exist) is refuted via an indirect argument, according to which we ought not to endorse an ideal of love free from envy, because that ideal is psychologically implausible. Finally, two cases studies from literature and TV are discussed in order to show that envying the beloved might be in some conditions a good thing.