American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volume 85, Issue 3, Summer 2011

Envy and Self-worth
Amending Aquinas’s Definition of Envy

In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas offers an adept account of the vice of envy. Despite the virtues of his account, he nevertheless fails to provide an adequate definition of the vice. Instead, he offers two different definitions each of which fails to identify what is common to all cases of envy. Here I supplement Aquinas’s account by providing what I take to be common to all cases of envy. I argue that what is common is a “perception of inferiority”—when a person perceives her own self-worth to be inferior to another and thereby feels her own self-worth diminish. By incorporating perceptions of inferiority into the definition of envy, we obtain a definition that retains the spirit of Aquinas’s thought, while improving upon its letter.