The Ethics of Ambiguity

The Ethics of Ambiguity (French title: Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté) is Simone de Beauvoir's second major non-fiction work. It was prompted by a lecture she gave in 1945, after which she claimed that it was impossible to base an ethical system on her partner Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical work Being and Nothingness (French title: L'Être et le néant). The following year, over a six-month period, she took on the challenge, publishing the resulting text first as installments in Les Temps modernes and then, in November 1947, as a book.

The Ethics of Ambiguity consists of three parts and a short conclusion.

"Ambiguity and Freedom," lays out the philosophical underpinnings of de Beauvoir's stance on ethics. She asserts that "man" (meaning human beings generally) is fundamentally free, a freedom that comes from his "nothingness," which is an essential aspect of his ability to be self-aware, to be conscious of himself: "... the nothingness which is at the heart of man is also the consciousness that he has of himself." But man is also a thing, a "facticity," an object for others. The ambiguity is that each of us is both subject and object, freedom and facticity. As free, we have the ability to take note of ourselves and choose what to do. As factic, we are constrained by physical limits, social barriers and the expectations and political power of others.

De Beauvoir rejects any notion of an absolute goodness or moral imperative that exists on its own. "...there exists no absolute value before the passion of man, outside of it, in relation to which one might distinguish the useless from the useful." Values come only from our choices.

Human freedom can be only in concrete projects, not in the abstract. Freedom "requires the realization of concrete ends, of particular projects."

The types of particular content that are suitable are discussed in Part III.

Part II, "Personal Freedom and Others," examines a number of different ways that people try to deny their freedom, as freedom can be uncomfortable and disquieting. The freedom to choose entails the freedom to try to avoid one's freedom. Before we can even do that, however, we start as children, who take the values of the adults around them as ready-made things. She calls this the attitude of "seriousness," in which the child "escapes the anguish of freedom" by thinking of values as existing objectively, outside himself, rather than as an expression of his freedom. Once past childhood, one can be a sub-man who avoids all questions of freedom and assumes himself not free. The next rung up the hierarchy is the serious man who "gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned," in effect reverting to a kind of childhood. Both the sub-man and the serious man refuse to recognize that they are free, in the sense of being able to choose their own values.

...
Wikipedia