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Simone de Beauvoir

The Ethics of Ambiguity

Charlotte Moore freely subjects de Beauvoir’s ethics to a discerning scrutiny.

In her 1947 book The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir outlines an existentialist ethics. She was inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre ’s promise to do so at the end of Being and Nothingness (1943); a project for which he wrote many notes but which he never completed. The Ethics of Ambiguity is one of de Beauvoir’s most intriguing and original philosophical works. But is the theory it contains defensible? And does it give us practical guidance for how to live our lives?

In The Bonds of Freedom (BF), a careful analysis of de Beauvoir’s ethics, Kristana Arp asks whether de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity is actually a form of ethical subjectivism. Arp examines a set of possible existentialist ethical perspectives, particularly those that deal with freedom and values, to try to tell whether or not they can be undermined by this charge.

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