The Ethics of Ambiguity
Simone de Beauvoir
Beauvoir published Pour une morale de l'ambiguite in 1947, running it in Les Temps modernes in three instalments the same year before it appeared as a book. She argues that freedom is not a licence but a condition that binds a person to the freedom of others, and that ethics begins where that ambiguity is accepted rather than resolved. The link is to the Citadel Press edition of the complete text, not the selected chapters the old link asked for.
Why you should read this
Beauvoir's attempt to build an ethics on existentialist foundations, arguing that human freedom is inescapably ambiguous and that a genuine morality means willing the freedom of others alongside your own. Written partly as an answer to critics who claimed existentialism could offer no ethics at all.
- Field
- Philosophy
- Form
- Non-fiction
- Published
- 1947
- Themes
- EthicsPhilosophy
