 Even those who deny that “benign envy” is a kind of envy (hereafter, “deniers”) will grant the existence of cases in which people want to have skills or other traits that are possessed by another person, and are pained by their lack, but in which they have no desire at all for the other person to lose those traits. Call such a state “emulative desire.” Apparently some other languages have a word for that  state.[8]  What deniers deny is that emulative desire is an instance of envy (or of “envy proper”, as Rawls puts it). But what is at stake in such a claim? We have already noted that ordinary usage surely permits application of “envy” in such cases, and in others besides, so linguistic propriety is not the issue. One way of understanding the debate concerns which taxonomy of mental states carves emotions at their joints—that is, carves them in ways that reflect psychological kinds that support predictions and explanatory generalizations. 