Excusable Envy

Recent scholarship has sought to reclaim Rawls’s notion of excusable envy as a potential resource for advancing justice. This paper argues that these authors not only misread Rawls’s conceptual account but also unwittingly reproduce a libertarian objection to equality and misconstrue how envy functions in real societies. The first section contrasts their views with Rawls’s treatment of moral attitudes and vices, arguing that such readings misrepresent his views and aims. Because they mistake a vice for a moral attitude and thereby embrace a view contrary to Rawls’s, they ultimately echo the very critics—conservatives and libertarians who claim that equality stems from envy—against whose arguments Rawls sought to insulate his theory. The second section explores this background shedding light to an implicit aim in Rawls’s decision to address envy. The final section assesses whether this scholarship offers a genuinely new perspective, rehabilitating envy as significant for the promotion of justice. Drawing on the history of philosophical thought and empirical research, the paper argues that these accounts misunderstand how envy operates in actual social contexts and thus rely on an emotion ill-suited to the advancement of justice

Consequentialism · Economic Justice · Mistake · Reflective equilibrium · Scholarship · Veil of ignorance · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Political Philosophy and Ethics