Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY 287
'It is in the very nature of "happiness" to tease man and to mock him
as long as he lives, to lure him on, to mislead him and leave him standing
with empty hands. ' Up to this point, what is really meant is 'having good
luck. ' Hartmann continues: 'Happiness does not depend solely upon the
attainable goods oflife to which it seems to be attached. It depends at the
same time, or rather primarily, upon an inner predisposition, a sensitiveness
of the individual himself, his capacity for happiness. It is . . .
smallest where it is passionately yearned for, and striven after.' 16 But
what is meant here is happiness and not good luck.
This enables us to pursue the thought to its conclusion. To begin
with-perhaps before some egalitarian started to think up plans for
improving the world-luck meant something unpredictable and fleeting,
which one person might have rather than another, or at least not both
at once. Contentment is rather nearer to the word 'happiness' but
postulates that there should be no striving or yearning for luck. Towards
the end of the nineteenth century, contentment became unfashionable,
and to preach it was regarded as reactionary. Everyone had to be happy,
and that happiness must be fully secured and guaranteed by the state. But
what they failed to understand was that, in a welfare state where everyone
is given everything he needs and has to contribute only what is within his
means, there neither could nor should be such a thing as good or bad
luck. Yet happiness-that is, contentment-can no longer exist in such
as society, for it is conditional on recognizing that not everyone can enjoy
good luck at the same time.
Equality of opportunity
The absolute equality of opportunity that prevails in a game of chance,
which, as all the players know from the start, can be won only by a very
few, has nothing to do with the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
It is true that a few envious souls may be temporarily annoyed at
someone else winning the luck draw, but the fact that windfalls of this
kind are tax-free in Europe (not in the United States) shows that the
winner of the jackpot is very little envied. This is because of the real
equality of opportunity and the absolute fortuitousness of the method of
16 N. Hartmann, Ethics, I, pp. 149-50.