Jealousy

Chapter 6 proceeds via a critical review of recent writings about jealousy in philosophy and psychology. Although Aristotle himself did not explore this emotion, it is easily amenable to an Aristotle-style analysis. It turns out, however, that although Aristotelian conceptual and moral arguments about the necessary conceptual features of jealousy qua specific emotion, and the intrinsic value or disvalue of a stable trait of jealousy for eudaimonia, do carry philosophical mileage, they may fail to cut ice with psychologists who tend to focus on jealousy as a broad dimension of temperament. The chapter reveals a disconcerting lack of cross-disciplinary work on jealousy: the sort of work that has moved the discourse on various other emotions forward in recent years. It explains how the best way to ameliorate this lacuna is, precisely, through an Aristotelian analysis, where jealousy is (perhaps counter-intuitively) accorded a place as a potentially virtuous emotion.