The Ethics of Ambiguity

A short book by Simone de Beauvoir, published in 1947, which answers the charge that existentialism cannot ground an ethics. Beauvoir starts from the ambiguity of the human condition: we are both free subjects and objects among others, both consciousness and body, and aware that we will die. Traditional moralities try to escape this ambiguity; she wants an ethics that accepts it. Freedom is the source of all value, but my freedom is real only when I also will the freedom of others. She describes a series of attitudes that flee freedom: the sub-man who avoids commitment, the serious man who submits to a cause as an absolute, the nihilist, the adventurer and the passionate man. Children, she notes, live in a world of ready-made values, and adults are tempted to recover that comfort. The final part tests her view against political action, asking how far one may sacrifice people now for a liberated future.

It is the clearest attempt to build an existentialist ethics, and its portrait of the 'serious man' who hides behind a cause fits many modern forms of zeal.