The Ethics of Ambiguity

⚖The case for it

Where Sartre declared freedom and left you staring at the void, Beauvoir asks the harder question: what do you DO with that freedom? Her answer (an ethics built on ambiguity, on the recognition that my freedom depends on yours) is more rigorous and more humane than anything in Being and Nothingness. The chapter on the 'serious man' who hides from freedom behind fixed values is a devastating portrait of most adults.

— the canon

✕The case against

Beauvoir later called this the book of hers that most irritated her, and her complaint was fair: the ethics stays abstract, hovering above the actual situations it claims to address. The gallery of evaders (the sub-man, the serious man, the nihilist, the adventurer) is a typology, neat and bloodless. The Sartrean scaffolding she was escaping is still half-attached.

— the honest librarian