 Many authors posit a distinction between two kinds of envy: a malicious or invidious form, and a benign, emulative, or admiring variety of  envy.[3]  Typically, the point of the distinction is to identify a class of cases in which envy is somehow permissible or justifiable and separate them from cases in which it is not. While details differ, the general idea is that invidious envy involves a desire that the rival lose the good, whereas benign envy does  not.[4]  But other philosophers claim that benign envy is not envy at  all.[5]  Like many disagreements over the nature of emotions, this one threatens to become a merely verbal dispute, but it can be understood as a substantive question about the character of an empirical  phenomenon.[6]