Do you think jealousy is morally wrong or is it a natural thing to be jealous?

Comments

A difficult question! There do seem to be clear cases of when jealousy is a vice, especially when it leads to violence and inordinate, misplaced rage. Imagine I am so possessive of my partner that I constantly read his emails to others (secretly and without permission), I rarely trust him and so I regularly interrogate him when he comes back from a trip and I suspect there may have been some dangerous flirting. But as with envy, there seem to be appropriate and inappropriate kinds of jealousy. Imagine I have been a good father to my son, but when he is in college he becomes fixated on an alcoholic, pro-pornography, racist philosophy professor whom my son idolizes and calls "Daddy." Probably my response would not be jealousy, but to seek to expose "Daddy" as a fraud, but I think I might well feel that the affections my son should have for me (or, dropping "should," my son having emotions that are fitting in a father-son relationship) and directing them to a kind of rival, surrogate bad Dad figure. After all I did for my boy, why is he looking to Professor X as a role model and father figure? Jealousy (at least in normal, non-pathological conditions) can also be a way of showing that one cares about a person and a relationship. We are not jealous of things or persons we do not care about. I would only be jealous of a colleague who receives the lion share of adoration on my campus if I cared what students thought and felt about their professors and I felt as though I deserve at least a little bit of affection. A similar point can be made about envy. Envy is destructive if it is in a resentful, grudge mode. This would be a case in which I might envy a philosopher because I want to have her kind of talent and reputation and I want her to somehow fail or loose her edge. But there is a form of envy which may take another form: I might envy a colleague's talents and take great enjoyment in her success and seek to emulate her wonderful example of what it is to be an outstanding generous philosopher who genuinely cares about colleagues and students.

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