xbacksideslider

I'm new here, having found this old thread when I searched the word jealousy as an antonym to the word envy. General usage treats these two words as synonyms. Putting etymological relativism aside, I think their conventional usage is at least vague and at worst profoundly incorrect. I want to insist that both words go to property rights - their taking versus their defense. I understand that envy, according to convention and according to Rand, implicates factors such as interpersonal resentment as well as personal property factors such as covetousness. I want to see envy as related to a desire to steal someone else's property and jealousy as related to defense of that property. This is a concept of property broadly defined, to include not just personalty but also a person's reputation, attractiveness, intelligence, achievements, and the like. Thus, envy is evil and jealousy is righteous. They are both incipient, in the mind, not yet in action. Envy is about the idea of taking someone else's stuff. Jealousy is about the idea of keeping your own stuff. That distinction is offensive to the confiscatory egalitarian mind which generally loves to conflate the two words, treating them as synonyms; erasing the moral distinction. Admittedly, this sharpening of the difference between envy and jealousy is iconoclastic. I think that for Objectivists, and libertarians generally, it is critical to use language in the defense of the concept of property, in all its forms, as a core value.

John Laing, Los Angeles, CA Screen name is Xbacksideslider as I used to race motorcycles at a place called the Backside where we used to slide down the road. I don't do that anymore so I am now known as Xbacksideslider.