The Ethics of Ambiguity: An Existentialist Ethics

Abstract

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity1 is a long philosophical essay published by Gallimard in 1947. De Beauvoir says she wrote it in response to requests, from Camus and others, for an essay on action, and with a view to defending existentialism against attacks from French Marxists such as Henri Lefebvre and Paul Naville. The essay is divided broadly into three sections, called respectively ‘Ambiguity and Freedom’, ‘Personal Freedom and Others’, and ‘The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity’. Part I offers a defence of existentialism and, in particular, a defence of existentialist ethics. In Part II de Beauvoir offers a character ethics, that is, a series of profiles of human types; here she discusses, in the following sequence, the child, women, adolescence, the sub-man, the serious man, the nihilist, the adventurer, the passionate man, and the person who wills herself free. The section on the condition of women marks the first explicit and sustained recognition in her philosophical prose of an issue which will loom ever larger in her work as the decade progresses, culminating, of course, with the publication in 1949 of her feminist classic The Second Sex. Part III offers a detailed discussion of the ethics of violence; in it, de Beauvoir explores at length the philosophical basis of the ethical standpoints adumbrated in her Resistance novel The Blood of Other.