And in his "Augusta," the revelation that says it all comes after two cleaning women spend the entire play struggling with financial and moral difficulties while envying their rich employer.
Jealousy masqueraded as moral outrage, because people envied the food and entertainment these women had received as a result of their conduct.
"I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater," Pollan observes toward the end of his book "The Omnivore's Dilemma," shortly after describing the thrill of shooting a pig.
But in truth, it is difficult to find plausible explanations for the virulence of last week's attacks, except in the envy, hatred and moral confusion of those who plotted and perpetrated them.
Genealogy Treatise 1. Nietzsche's notion of 'ressentiment' seems to be a propensity that begins life as envy and takes on moral content only with the creation of the moral ideals to which it gives rise.
It could be argued that President Bush's moral clarity is to be envied as much as Tony Blair's practicality.
The claim that envy is not a moral emotion may be understood strongly, as the claim that it never involves a moral complaint per se, or weakly, as the claim that it need not embody such a complaint.
In any case, some version of the thesis that envy is not a moral emotion seems both plausible and necessary to make sense of the debate over whether egalitarianism is motivated by envy (see section 3.1 below).
Similarly, a high degree of envy might often impede moral motivation and behaviour, but a lower level can be a spur to great (and morally good) achievements.
Often, when talking about dictatorships in other parts of the world, we assume we have a moral authority that other nations can only envy.
