ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Envy and desire of destruction
Author: This Saint-Jean Isabelle
The notion of envy has been put by many economists at the heart of their theoretical reflections and especially in economic works devoted to the question of social justice. If different definitions of envy appears in economics, most economists give to this term “a precise technical sense” (P. J. Hammond, 1987). There is no place in such a definition for the idea that the envious individual wants to “destroy the advantages of the other” and for a “desire of destruction” (M. Fleurbaey, 1996). And this “technical” notion of envy is very different of the one appearing in the main philosophical texts devoted to it. In order to show that we will first identify and confront the main definitions of envy that appear in Aristotle and Thomas d’Aquin, D. Hume and A. Smith, and then E. Kant and J. Rawls and show that in all these texts one finds the same five characteristics of envy. Then we will try to explain the deep difference between this rather constant philosophical notion of envy and the economic one. We will try to show that this question is linked to the more general difficulty that our discipline seems to have to deal with “bad”, “ill-will” or “full of hatred” individuals.
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