Care, Freedom, and Reciprocity in the Ethics of Simone de Beauvoir

Abstract

To get to a place where you could love anything you chose-not to need permission for desire-well now, that was freedom.. An important aspect of contemporary ethics is questioning the nature of subjectivity. The agent is being redefined as connected rather than as solipsistically independent. In this essay, I look at the problem of envisioning a agent that accounts both for relationships with others and for liberatory independence. I argue that one's ability to love and give care is bound to one's ability to act on one's freedom. My aim is to consider vulnerability and an empowered freedom in feminist agency, and to propose an ethics that values both freedom and responsiveness to needs. In this essay I focus on the ideas of freedom, reciprocity, and ambiguity in the work of Simone de Beauvoir and use these ideas to augment the ethical notion of care. Beauvoir develops a relational subjectivity in The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex and this description of subj ectivity profoundly affects her discussions of freedom and reciprocity, making these concepts speak to women's oppression. Care ethics has been criticized for lacking reciprocity and for failing to promote freedom. I argue, however, that recognition of others' freedom is a response to the ethical needs of those others as well as one's own ethical needs, and thus is a form of care. This mutual recognition and response must be reciprocal, at least between those who can reciprocate, in order for persons to have political and ethical freedom. The ambiguity of the human condition in which we are both powerful and needy reflects the ambiguity of power in reciprocal relationships, in which each recognizes and helps the other. Mutual recognition of freedom is the attitude of the ethic of freedom and care that I want to develop. Care ethics as it has been construed thus far has been criticized for having inadequate notions of reciprocity. Descriptions of care as a value often portray a agent who always is ready to give to the other, who always is open to the other's needs, regardless of the harm that care might cause to the agent or to others. Such descriptions risk reinscribing patriarchal femininity, in which the is the one who gives on command and consequently cannot be autonomous in her decision-making. The moral woman of patriarchal femininity therefore is contradictory, since acting on command, that is, acting heteronomously, is not usually considered by philosophers to be a possible description of action. If care ethics is to be an ethic at all it must value the kind of action and response to needs which guarantee that care givers will define their own actions. Taking care in understanding another's demands certainly entails noticing when a person may be asking for care that is morally suspect or dangerous. Beauvoir's theory is consistent with many aspects of care ethics although her emphasis on political freedom might mask these similarities. Both value subjectivity rather than obj ectivity, and both regard generosity as better grounded and therefore more valid if less distinction between persons and more self-fulfillment are found in taking the other as an end. Beauvoir suggests principles that she wants everyone to hold, but we develop those principles through collective action rather than through some process of abstraction. For Beauvoir, ethics proposes methods, not recipes for right action. Ordinary situations are so complex that one must make an involved analysis before coming to a decision. This is where a strong notion of reciprocity and Beauvoir's notion of freedom can aid in developing the empowered action I am seeking. Reminiscent of Hegel, Beauvoir points out that in order to be free one needs others to recognize her freedom. Beauvoir, however, does not see a necessary struggle between two subjects or a need to destroy the other to establish one's own subjectivity. …