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¶ … Personal Freedom and Others
Simone de Beauvoir's essay the Ethics of Ambiguity, in which she outlines an ethics derived from existentialism, largely drawing from and responding to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, is broken into three main sections and a brief conclusion. The second section is entitled Personal Freedom and Others. In it, de Beauvoir contends that morality and free will are the same thing, or at least two sides of the same coin.
She begins her argument by referring to Descartes' assertion that man is unhappy because he used to be a child. The child's world is based on an idea of "for-other;" that is, life for a childhood is seen as preparation for the time when the child will be as important and complete as adults seem. When most children reach adolescence, the image of the world as one with intrinsic meaning and substance begins to disintegrate, and true freedom is revealed in the meaninglessness of the world -- or rather, in the individual's ability and need to shape their own subjective meaning. But the child was unknowingly shaping his character throughout childhood, and though this cannot foretell the specifics of moral choice, it creates the attitude from which the individual's moral choice springs. Thus, free will -- as demonstrated by moral choice -- is in actuality a series of discrete and connected choices, each dependent on those preceding it as they shape the individual's attitude.
De Beauvoir then describes the sub-man, who wishes he did not exist. Yet he is the very consciousness that is willing this non-existence, and is thus self-defeating. To escape his subjectivity, he immerses himself in the object, and Lives fro a Thing rather tan for himself. She derides nihilist thought, too, claiming that though neither the world nor the individual have inherent and objective justifications, as the nihilists claim, it is the individual's responsibility to create that justification. Several other attitudes, given archetypal names like "the adventurer" and "the passionate man" are described, along with their mistaken takes on morality and free will. The truly free will, de Beauvoir claims, is in understanding and accepting -- indeed, actively engaging with -- the fact that the future and the world are ultimately unknowable, and therefore subjectively creatable.
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