Ethics

The Ethics of Ambiguity

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Simone de Beauvoir

1947

The Ethics of Ambiguity is Beauvoir's systematic attempt to derive a positive ethics from Sartrean existentialism — to show that the ontological condition of freedom does not lead to moral paralysis or nihilism but to a demanding and specific set of ethical obligations. The book begins from the existentialist starting point: human existence is irreducibly ambiguous, suspended between facticity (what we are given — our body, situation, past) and transcendence (the freedom that perpetually surpasses that given). This ambiguity is not a problem to be solved but the very structure of the human condition, and authentic existence consists in taking it up honestly rather than fleeing into bad faith. Beauvoir then argues that freedom cannot be genuinely willed in isolation: the liberation of each person depends on and requires the liberation of all, because human beings are constituted through their relations with others and oppression of one person corrupts the freedom of the oppressor as well as the oppressed. From this she derives a commitment to political liberation — not as an abstract principle but as the concrete, historical work of extending freedom to those whose situation denies it. The book analyses various forms of bad faith (the serious man who takes values as given, the nihilist who denies value entirely, the adventurer who treats freedom as mere power) before arriving at the figure of the genuine moral agent, who accepts the weight of freedom and acts in solidarity with others' liberation. It remains the most rigorous attempt to show that existentialism demands, rather than forbids, ethical and political commitment.