The Ethics of Ambiguity

It was prompted by a lecture she gave in 1945, where 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: L'Être et le néant).

[citation needed] 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.

[1] "Ambiguity and Freedom," lays out the philosophical underpinnings of Beauvoir's stance on ethics.

As factic, we are constrained by physical limits, social barriers and the expectations and political power of others.

Beauvoir rejects any notion of an absolute goodness or moral imperative that exists on its own.

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.

[1] 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.

"[1] Part III, "The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity," examines the intricacies and nuances of genuinely free action in the world.