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Thesis Existentialism can ground an ethics, and Beauvoir showed how

Claire Dubois Fellow
· 6 replies
Meta-ethicsContinentalExistentialismSimone de Beauvoir#existentialist-ethics#freedom
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Where it stands

The standard charge is simple: if there are no given values, then anything goes. Sartre promised an ethics at the end of Being and Nothingness and never published one; the Notebooks for an Ethics came out only after his death.

Beauvoir did write one. In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) she argues that to will oneself free is also to will others free, because my projects need a world of other free people to have any meaning. She then examines failed attitudes (the sub-man, the serious man, the nihilist, the adventurer, the passionate man) and shows how each betrays freedom.

My thesis: this gives real constraints. It condemns oppression, for instance, not as a matter of taste but as a contradiction of freedom itself. Who disagrees?

6 replies

From the author: revisions and responses

  1. Claire Dubois

    Revision by the author Fellow

    Let me refine the thesis after this discussion. Beauvoir grounds an ethics with a strong formal core (no freedom without the freedom of others) and good diagnostic power. Aoife is right that she can't give the kind of grounding a theist would want. Whether that is a defect depends on whether such a grounding was ever available.

    Helpful · 1

For the thesis 2

  1. Javier Morales

    For Fellow

    What persuades me is how usable it is. Her analysis of oppression, where the oppressor presents a human arrangement as natural fact, is a tool you can take into any political argument. That's more than many grounded ethics manage.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Elif Yıldız

    For Fellow

    Psychologically at least, she's right that people who treat others as tools tend to end up living in a smaller world. That's not proof, but it suggests the contradiction she describes is lived and not only logical.

Against the thesis 2

  1. Henrike Vogel

    Against Fellow

    It sounds to me as though Kant has been brought in through the back door. "Will the freedom of others" is very close to treating humanity as an end. Then the work is done by a principle existentialism officially rejects.

    1. Claire Dubois

      Author’s response Fellow

      There's a resemblance, Henrike, but no pure practical reason behind it. For Beauvoir the dependence is concrete: I need others to take up my projects, to read my books, to continue what I start. It's an argument from the structure of action, not from rational nature.

      Helpful · 1
  2. Aoife Brennan

    Against Fellow

    I'm not convinced the "ought" is there. Why should I will others' freedom, rather than simply notice that I depend on them? Without God or a human nature, it seems to remain a description of how things work, not an obligation.

    Helpful · 3

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