Envy is a vicious and shameful response to the good fortune of others, one that ruins friendships and plagues societies-or so the common thinking goes, shaped by millennia of religious and cultural condemnation. Envy's bad reputation is not completely unwarranted; envy can indeed motivate malicious and counterproductive behavior and may strain or even tear apart relations between people. However, that is not always the case. Investigating the complex nature of this emotion reveals that it plays important functions in social hierarchies and it can motivate one to self-improve and even to achieve moral virtue. Philosophers and psychologists in this volume explore envy's characteristics in different cultures, spanning from small hunter-gatherer communities to large industrialized countries, and contexts as diverse as academia, marketing, artificial intelligence, and Buddhism. They explore envy's role in both the personal and the political sphere, showing the many ways in which envy can either contribute or detract to our flourishing as individuals and as citizens of modern democracies.

In early March of 2020, Americans watched with uncertain terror as the “novel coronavirus� pandemic unfolded in the coastal cities of Seattle and Boston as well as around the world. No one in the heartland state of Ohio had been infected—as far as we knew, given the scarcity of tests. One week later, Ohio announced its first confirmed cases. Just one year later, the state had over a million cases and 18,000 Ohioans had died. What happened in the course of that first pandemic year is not only a story of a public health disaster, but also a story of social disparities and moral dilemmas, of lives and livelihoods turned upside down, and of institutions and safety nets stretched to their limits.  This volume tells the human story of COVID in Ohio, America’s “bellwether� state. Scholars and practitioners examine the pandemic response from multiple angles, and contributors from numerous walks of life offer moving first-person reflections. Two themes emerge again and again: how the pandemic revealed a deep tension between individual autonomy and the collective good, and how it exacerbated social inequalities. When COVID hit Ohio, it found a state divided along social, economic, and political lines. State leaders and health care institutions struggled to react to the growing emergency without much help from the federal government. Meanwhile, individuals and families were put under enormous stress. Many already marginalized and underserved communities were left behind.    Chapters address such varied topics as mask mandates, ableism, prisons, food insecurity, access to reproductive health care, and the need for more Black doctors. The book concludes with an interview with Dr. Amy Acton, the state’s top public health official at the time COVID hit Ohio.  Collectively, the volume captures the devastating impact of the pandemic, both in the public discord it has unearthed and in the unfair burdens it has placed on the groups least equipped to bear them.