Is Wanting What Someone Else Has Always Envy?

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle characterises envy as pain at another person’s good fortune. Contemporary discussions usually add a comparative structure: I take someone like me to possess a good that I lack, and the disparity itself troubles me. Simply seeing a colleague promoted and deciding to improve my own abilities is not automatically envy. I may merely have discovered a worthwhile goal.

The disputed case is “benign envy”. On one view, distress at the gap can still count as envy when it motivates self-improvement without any wish that the other person lose what they have. On another view, that state is better called emulative desire or admiration, because envy proper contains at least some tendency to prefer that the rival lose the advantage. The disagreement is not only about polite wording; it concerns which classification best explains motivation.

Envy also differs from jealousy and resentment. Jealousy typically concerns the feared loss of a relationship, while resentment includes a complaint that one has been treated unjustly. My judgement is that we need not condemn the emotion before understanding it. Two questions help. Would I still pursue the good if the other person kept theirs? Would I feel relieved if they lost it while I gained nothing? The first points towards aspiration; the second more clearly exposes envy. The moral significance then depends on what we do with the feeling and whether the comparison reveals a genuine injustice.

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/envy/