Beauvoir

Question 1

How does Beauvoir describe the basic tenets of existential philosophy and how does she use these in her explanation of the ethics of ambiguity?

Answer 1

existence precedes essence: there is no stable absolute nature or essence that makes you a human being. We don’t come into the world with a set essense, but through our lives and expiriences we develop our essence. We don’t have to fulfill a purpose, we just make meaning for ourselves. This provides a ton of freedom.
Ambiguity is that freedom is freedom within a given circumstance.

Question 2

2. What does Beauvoir mean by the term “ambiguity” especially as it applies to ethics?

Answer 2

not one without another. We are not so radically free to be free from situation. rather it is the ambigous relation between freedom within a situation, and freedom in a situation.

Question 3

3. How does absolute freedom of choice require absolute responsibility?

Answer 3

we are not determined, and so we make our own decisions. This means we are absolutely responsible for our actions. With the responsibility we are going to be concerned with the consequences of our actions.

Question 4

4. What does Beauvoir mean when she writes: “to will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision” (24)?

Answer 4

we can be passive from our freedom that is immoral

Question 5

5. Why does Beauvoir assert that existentialism alone give a real role to evil?

Answer 5

Evil is failure. With our freedom, and no fate is determined in advance we have chances to make mistakes.

Question 6

6. Discuss at least two of the seven ethical questions Beauvoir raises in the first chapter. What is the question and how does she answer it?

Answer 6

But if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? :
However, far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well.

Isn’t it contradictiory to will ourselves free if we are already free?
- No freedom= is not a possession, but action itself