Simon De Beauvoir "Ambiguity" in Simone De

Simon De Beauvoir "Ambiguity" in Simone de Beauvoir's "The Ethics of Ambiguity" promotes the idea that people need to abandon any preconception when trying to help a person. In his struggle to help the respective individual, one would have to concentrate on putting behind him or her everything society taught him or her and try to devise an original solution -- one that would actually help the person in need rather than to be socially acceptable.

Many people have the tendency to unconsciously consider their personal interests when trying to help others. While this might seem like the best thing to do in some situations, it can sometimes prevent these people from actually be able to understand how they should help individuals they want to assist. Beauvoir emphasizes a person's role in the world as being different from his or her role in society.

Society promotes a mechanism through which people agree to act in accordance with a series of legislations and are influenced to develop a sort of hesitance toward discounting them -- they practically believe that they need to consider their information they have accumulated through the years before acting. Experience is generally seen as the main tool keeping society together, taking into account the way it helps people overcome problems and how it eventually enables them to be active members of the social order.

The writer does not attempt to diminish the risk "of inventing an original solution." (Beauvoir) However, she tries to get readers to understand that this risk is a necessary step in the moral progress of mankind. It seems that she wants people to learn that there is a great difference between thinking morally and thinking in agreement with socially acceptable laws. Simply trying to get people to do what one thinks is normal is not enough, as those people might seem normality completely different from him or her.

Beauvoir wants to demonstrate that normality should not be treated as a general concept just as people cannot be provided with help by considering a general system of thinking. One person will never be completely equal to another and it would thus be wrong to provide both people with the same treatment when trying to help them. Attempting to get a person off of drugs can actually hurt him or her.

"A deprivation of a few hours will do nothing but exasperate his torments uselessly; and he may have recourse to extreme means to get what I do not give him." (Beauvoir) Being a part of society is similar to being a part of a game: individuals can join the respective game depending on whether or not they want to. Someone who does not want to put across social behaviors should not be forced to do so, as.