Existentialism & the Absurd Part 7: Existential Ethics

The Problem of Ethics Without God

Dostoevsky's character Ivan Karamazov puts the worry crisply: "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." Sartre quotes the line repeatedly. The standard worry is that without a divine lawgiver, a fixed human nature, or a transcendent moral order, morality collapses into preference, will, or power.

The Standard Objection

Critics — both religious and secular — have argued that existentialism's emphasis on radical freedom and the absence of given values leaves no resources for distinguishing right from wrong. If I create my own values, what stops me from creating values that endorse cruelty? If existence precedes essence, on what basis do we condemn the Nazi's project of "becoming" a torturer? The objection is serious and has been pressed by figures as different as Catholic theologians, communist intellectuals, and Anglo-American moral philosophers.

The Existentialist Response

The existentialist response runs along three lines:

• Negative: The "given" moralities of the past did not, in fact, prevent atrocity. Christianity coexisted with the Inquisition and the slave trade. Kantian rationalism was Germany's official school of ethics in the lead-up to 1933. The objection assumes that grounded ethics protects us; the historical record is at best mixed.
• Positive: The structure of human freedom, properly understood, generates real moral demands. To deny the freedom of another is to deny the very thing that makes my own freedom possible. (This is Beauvoir's central move.)
• Diagnostic: Most evil, Sartre argues, runs on bad faith. Torturers, bureaucrats of cruelty, pogromists almost always tell themselves they "had no choice," they "were just following orders," "anyone in their position would have done the same." Strip these lies away — own the freedom — and most evil cannot sustain itself.

Created Values & Radical Responsibility

Sartre's claim in Existentialism is a Humanism is that there is no a priori Good, no value laid up in some Platonic heaven from which I could deduce my moral choices. There is only the human being, choosing — and through choosing, instituting a value.

Each Choice as Legislation

Here Sartre is closer to Kant than is sometimes recognized. When I choose, he says, I implicitly affirm that this is what a human being should do in such a situation. I cannot honestly say "this is right for me but not for anyone else"; that would be bad faith. To choose for myself is, silently, to legislate for humanity.

This is what makes existentialist responsibility so heavy. When I marry, I am affirming marriage as a human possibility. When I take a job, I am affirming that work. When I emigrate, I am affirming emigration. I cannot pretend my choices are personal in a way that exempts me from responsibility for the picture of humanity they paint.

Beauvoir's Situated Freedom

If Sartre gave existentialism its slogans, Beauvoir gave it its working ethics. The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) develops what an existential morality actually requires.

Willing the Freedom of Others

Beauvoir's central claim: my freedom is real only insofar as it wills the freedom of others. This is not a sentimental humanism; it is an analysis of the structure of freedom itself.

A free for-itself must transcend, project, undertake — and any project requires a world in which to act. That world is constituted with and by other free beings. If I work to suppress your freedom, I am working to shrink the very space in which my own freedom acts. A torturer's freedom is, in a deep sense, a less free freedom than a doctor's: it operates in a smaller, narrower, deader world.

Conversely, the genuinely authentic person aims at conditions in which others can become more free — because that is the condition under which she herself can be more free. Beauvoir thus arrives at a politically charged ethics of liberation that Sartre had only gestured at.

Against Oppression

Beauvoir defines oppression as a situation in which others' transcendence is forcibly held in immanence — they are denied the conditions to project, to choose, to grow. Patriarchy, colonialism, slavery, and totalitarianism are not just unjust by this or that external standard; they are structurally incompatible with authentic existence on either side. The oppressed are denied freedom; the oppressors deny themselves the only kind of freedom that is real.

This gives existentialism a genuine left-wing politics — not derived from Marxism or natural law but from the structure of human freedom itself. (Whether existentialism can ground every progressive cause is a separate, harder question; the basic anti-oppression commitment is solid.)

Existential vs Neurotic Guilt

Existentialism inherits and refines a distinction the Christian tradition already knew: there is a difference between guilt that signals something true and guilt that is a misfiring symptom.

Two Kinds of Guilt

Using Existential Guilt Well

The existential therapists (we will meet them in Part 8) are very careful here. To rush to soothe a client's guilt by reframing it as "irrational" is sometimes correct (when it is neurotic) and sometimes a betrayal (when it is existential). The deeper question is always: what is this guilt telling me about the life I am actually living?

Heidegger's analysis of conscience in Being and Time is helpful here. The voice of conscience, he says, is silent — it does not name a specific transgression. It calls Dasein from lostness in the They back to its ownmost potentiality-for-being. To hear it is already to be on the way out of inauthenticity. To silence it with distraction is to deepen the very condition that produced it.

Authenticity & Engagement

The positive ethical ideal of existentialism is authenticity (Part 5). But authenticity, in the hands of Sartre and Beauvoir, is not a private, monkish virtue. It necessarily issues in engagement with the world.

Sartre on Engagement

From the late 1940s onward, Sartre developed the concept of engagement — the writer's, the intellectual's, the citizen's commitment to take positions, support causes, refuse the safety of pure spectatorship. He famously declared that the writer is "in situation" — every word published is an act in the political world, whether the writer wants it to be or not. Refusing to engage is itself an engagement on the side of the status quo.

This led Sartre into a long, complicated relationship with Marxism, with anti-colonial movements (he wrote the preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth), and with the radical politics of the 1960s. The judgments he made along the way were not all wise; the principle that authentic existence requires engagement with the world's actual injustice has held up better than its applications.

A Working Existential Ethic

Pulling it all together, here is what an existential ethic looks like in practice:

This is, by any reasonable measure, a more demanding morality than most rule-based or utilitarian alternatives, not less. The objection that existentialism leaves us with "anything goes" depends on never actually trying to live by Sartre's or Beauvoir's standards. Try it for a week. The complaint will change.