This failure is precisely why people need ethics: to give themselves something to strive for. Existentialism, on the other hand, recognizes that this resolution into one or the other side of the binary is impossible no matter how much people try to impose their will on the world and pursue their goals, they will inevitably fail. Most philosophers, de Beauvoir explains, have tried to resolve one or the other half of this ambiguity: they have argued that people are immortal or only their intentions matter, for instance. In Part One, “Ambiguity and Freedom,” de Beauvoir starts by explaining the ways in which human experience is ambiguous: people honestly pursue their goals even though they know they will die everyone feels like a subject with a will in the world, but experiences everyone else as an object, and yet also knows that others also see them as an object and as much as people feel empowered to act in the world, they also recognize that the world is infinitely greater than they are and can easily overwhelm them. Instead of starting with a picture of the good, right, or just, de Beauvoir starts with the basic fact of human freedom, which she argues must be the foundation of all morality because it is the fact in virtue of which people can make moral decisions at all.ĭe Beauvoir divides her book into three parts, respectively covering the philosophical underpinnings of her “ethics of ambiguity,” the different kinds of ethical attitudes people can have depending on how they relate to their freedom, and what existentialism has to say about how people should relate to other human beings. Whereas most ethical systems try to determine what people ought to do based on abstract principles of morality, existentialists believe that it makes no sense to talk about such absolute ethical principles, because morality is actually something that people develop in and through their lives, rather than something woven into the timeless fabric of the universe. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, 20th-century French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir asks what ethics looks like from the perspective of the existentialist philosophy she has developed in conjunction with Jean-Paul Sartre.
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