Envy

Envy in this account is a sense of injustice rather than a wish to possess, and that changes what it predicts. It is the wish to right what is perceived to be an injustice in the allocation of glory and to restore pride to what is seen as its rightful owner, which is why it is aimed at people outside the endogroup or outside the endo-ideal position rather than at whoever has the most. Somebody with far more is not envied if their holding it is correct within the endoreality. Somebody with slightly more is envied intensely if it is not. The correlation between envy and later pleasure at the envied person's misfortune follows directly, since a demand for restoration of order is satisfied by the order being restored, which is what a fall accomplishes. Marsh puts the energy account underneath. Achievement rewards differ by position, since an endo-ideal receives energy for an achievement, a reflector brings their achievement to the endo-ideal as an offering and a negative image has their achievement energy released against them through envy and shame. Envy is therefore the mechanism by which the third case happens. Jealousy is a separate thing and Marsh keeps them apart. Jealousy is fear of a negative change to one's own endogroup status due to another's rise, so it concerns your own position, while envy concerns misplaced advantage generally. Envy can produce a longing for vengeance and jealousy a competitive resolve to do better.

Envy has a long moral history as one of the deadly sins and a long philosophical one, with Aristotle defining it as pain at the good fortune of others and Rawls distinguishing excusable general envy from the malicious kind. Helmut Schoeck argued that envy is a fundamental social force that societies must manage, and behavioural economics documents costly punishment of high earners in public goods games. Psychology divides benign from malicious envy by whether it motivates improvement or harm. Marsh's version differs by making envy conditional on group position rather than on the size of the gap. Where the standard accounts predict envy scaling with inequality, hers predicts it tracking whether the advantage is correctly placed, which accounts for the tolerance of very large disparities that the standard accounts struggle with.