Chapter 5

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR:
AN EXISTENTIAL-PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHICS

Gail Weiss
The George Washington University

1. BACKGROUND
Thanks to the recent efforts of feminist scholars, Simone de Beauvoir's fame as the
lifelong companion ofexistential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is slowly giving way
to a recognition of the originality ofher own work as a philosopher, autobiographer,
novelist, essayist, editor, and political activist. Her ethics, in particular, has received
a great deal of attention, not only because she offers the first formal articulation of
an existential ethics in her 1947 book, Pour une morale de l'ambiguite (published
in English in 1948 as The Ethics ofAmbiguity and hereafter abbreviated as EA), but
also because the moral challenges she discusses there and elsewhere in her works
seem as appropriate today as they were half a century ago.
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris on January 9, 1908. Aside from summer
vacations at her relatives' homes in the French countryside as a young girl, a couple
of years spent teaching in lycees outside of Paris after she obtained her agregation
in philosophy at the Sorbonne, and her regular travels as an adult, Beauvoir resided
in Paris throughout her life and died there on April 14, 1986. As a member of the
French Resistance, Beauvoir remained in Paris during the difficult years of the
German Occupation, and toward the end of the war, she co-founded and co-edited
with Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and others the political journal Les Temps
Modernes.
Beauvoir's best known philosophical work, Le deuxieme sexe (published in
English in 1952 as The Second Sex and hereafter referred to as SS), was first
published in France by Gallimard in two volumes in 1949. In this book, Beauvoir
uses an existential framework to address the question "What does it mean to be a
woman?" Focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on the situation of Western
women, her text incorporates insights from a variety of disciplines, including
philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and biology.
Given its fame today as a "landmark" feminist text, it is easy to forget that the
initial public reception of The Second Sex was far from positive. Indeed, the text
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2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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was sharply criticized by the media and by some ofBeauvoir's own colleagues for
the unconventionality of its subject matter as well as for the brutally frank
condemnations Beauvoir offers of such venerated social institutions as marriage and
motherhood. American feminists in the 1960s such as Betty Friedan took Beauvoir
to task for her repeated assertion that the housewife leads an immanent existence,
but these same women were nonetheless strongly influenced by her work, as have
been the generations of feminist scholars that followed them.
After the controversy surrounding the publication of The Second Sex, Beauvoir
decided to stop writing philosophy and turned her attention exclusively to literature.
Philosophy, however, was never left behind. Her literary works develop the
implications of central existential themes such as intersubjectivity, freedom,
responsibility, death, and deception. Interestingly, Sartre claimed that she was the
better philosopher of the two of them, while she claimed to prefer Sartre 's literature
to his philosophy.
In the 1990s, there has been what can legitimately be called a Beauvoir
"renaissance." New generations of feminist scholars have been attracted to her
work, not merely for its significant historical interest, but also because of her
provocative analyses of gender, race, sexuality, and class oppression. Despite her
protestations that her ideas were an extension of Sartre's and not original in their
own right, recent Beauvoir scholars have shown the ways in which she departs from
a Sartrean framework and, in so doing, extends the possibilities of existentialphenomenological thought.
By examining Beauvoir's ethics as it is explicitly presented in her early work
and then turning to its nuanced development in her later work, we can best
appreciate her sophisticated understanding of the ambiguities that characterize
human existence from one moment to the next, ambiguities that nonetheless
demand an unambiguous, ethical response.
2. CONFLICTS OF INTERPRETATION

With the recent surge of interest in Beauvoir's oeuvre, it should not surprise us if
special attention has been paid to her ethics. After all, concerns about the
responsibilities we have to ourselves, to others, and to our shared situation extend
throughout her work. Moreover, one of her best-known philosophical texts, The
Ethics ofAmbiguity, seeks to provide a concrete analysis of the ongoing demands
of an ethical life. But despite the serious attention Beauvoir gives to the ethical
dimensions of human existence-dimensions that cut to the very heart of our being
with and for others-the ethics she offers often raises more questions than it
answers.
Commentators have provided various readings of Beauvoir's ethics. These
readings have appropriately focused not only on The Ethics ofAmbiguity, but also

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on other texts that take up ethical issues, such as Pyrrhus et Cineas (1944) with its
discussion of the inevitability of violence and oppression and The Second Sex with
its focus on the constraints placed upon women's freedom by their existence within,
and subjection to, a set of interlocking patriarchal social systems. Yet despite this
interest in the ethical implications of her work, there has been relatively little
agreement among Beauvoir's commentators about what the central claims of her
ethics are, or even about the role women, men, society, and women's own bodies
play in an individual's possibilities for living ethically. A point on which there is
relative agreement, however, is that for Beauvoir the ethical cannot be restricted to
a separate sphere of existence, since ethical issues underlie all of the projects in
which we engage. In other words, we cannot view the ethical as coming into play
only on some occasions and not others, since it concerns the very manner in which
we live our bodies, our relations with others, and our situations. This point of
consensus has given rise to alternative readings, however, precisely because the
ethical informs and is informed by all of the other key concepts that motivate
Beauvoir's work, including transcendence, immanence, choice, commitment,
freedom, oppression, consciousness, the body, the Other, and the situation.
One's understanding of the specific moral challenges posed by Beauvoir's
conception of the ethical depends, I would argue, upon which aspect of human
existence one takes as a starting point for one's analysis. For instance, if one begins
from the standpoint of freedom and transcendence, two seemingly essential
requirements for ethical existence for Beauvoir as well as for Sartre, then one's
emphasis will be placed on how specific individuals can realize what Beauvoir calls
"moral freedom." By contrast, if one focuses on the ethical demands placed upon
us by the existence of others, then the emphasis will shift from the subjective to the
intersubjective domain.
The consequences of emphasizing the subjective dimensions of freedom rather
than its intersubjective dimensions (or vice versa) can be quite serious. For if one
concentrates too narrowly on those places where Beauvoir describes freedom as the
transcendence of the givens of one's own situation, the danger is that her ethics
appears to be too solipsistic since the attainment of moral freedom appears to be a
purely individual project. On the other hand, if one concentrates too heavily on the
passages where she emphatically maintains that one's freedom cannot be achieved
unless others are also free, then freedom (and an ethical existence) seems
impossible to achieve, since millions of oppressed peoples continue to exist in the
world. Rather than privilege one domain at the expense of the other, it is essential
to appreciate that for Beauvoir, attaining one's moral freedom is never merely an
individual project, but always a social and political project as well. Thus the very
project of"willing one's freedom" always occurs within a broader context in which
my freedom both enables and is enabled by, constrains and is constrained by, the
freedom of others.

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To do justice to the ways in which "willing one's freedom" is both an

individual and a collective project, let us begin by examining Beauvoir's ethics,
first from the standpoint of what she, following Sartre, calls being-for-itself, and
then from the standpoint of what both call being-for-others. After examining these
two dimensions of her ethics, I will address another ofBeauvoir's ethical concerns
that has hitherto received relatively little attention, namely, the relationship between
morality and deception.
3.

FREEDOM AND FACT! CITY

In The Ethics ofAmbiguity, Beauvoir repeatedly suggests that the exercise of moral
freedom involves an affirmation of our transcendence in the face of the continual
constraints offered by others, by the contingencies of the situation, and by the
demands of our own bodies. In some of the most famous early passages from this
text, the Sartrean tension between the transcendence associated first and foremost
with the consciousness of the for-itself and the immanence associated with the
materiality of the in-itself is explicitly invoked. "The goal which my freedom aims
at," Beauvoir tells us, "is conquering existence across the always inadequate density
ofbeing" (EA, 30).
My transcendence only becomes meaningful, for Beauvoir, if it is positively
assumed through a concrete engagement with the givens of the situation. The
situation therefore provides the content as well as the context for an ethical
existence, but my ability to detach myself consciously (through reflection) from my
situation in order to evaluate the possibilities it presents to me is absolutely
essential to the ethical "justification" of my existence. On this account, the situation
provides a necessary obstacle to my freedom. The situation is necessary because it
forces me to engage my freedom concretely, which is the only way in which my
freedom can become meaningful to myself and to others. It is also an obstacle
because my freedom must triumph over the constraints the situation places upon the
realization of my projects. As a necessary obstacle, however, there is always a
danger that the situation will triumph over me, and that I will fail to transcend it but
will instead become mired in its immanence.
Beauvoir herself recognizes this possibility. She describes it as contributing to
the constant threat of failure that haunts my existence from one moment to the next.
For as Beauvoir makes clear, there are not one but many ways to fail: "one may
hesitate to make oneself a lack of being, one may withdraw before existence, or one
may falsely assert oneself as being, or assert oneself as nothingness. One may
realize his freedom only as an abstract independence, or, on the contrary, reject with
despair the distance which separates us from being. All errors are possible since
man is a negativity, and they are motivated by the anguish he feels in the face of his
freedom. Concretely, men slide incoherently from one attitude to another" (EA, 34 ).

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Undoubtedly, these are all very different kinds of failures, and Beauvoir goes
on to discuss them through the examples she provides of the subman, the serious
man, the nihilist, and the adventurer. The subman clings to his facticity, thereby
failing to recognize and act upon his transcendence, while the serious man's
unquestioning acceptance of a set of fixed values absolves him of the need to take
responsibility for them. The nihilist responds to the anxiety of his freedom by
attempting to be nothing (EA, 52). The adventurer comes closest to living ethically
because the meaningfulness of his actions flows from the commitments he has
made to them, but he operates too solipsistically to be granted ethical standing
unless he wills the freedom of others at the same time that he wills his own
freedom.
In all these examples, with the exception of the adventurer, the individual's
failure to become ethical is directly due to his failure to live the tension between
freedom and facticity; instead of affirming this tension as an inescapable feature of
human existence, he tries to resolve it by negating his freedom (subman), by
negating his facticity (nihilist), or by sacrificing his freedom to a self-created
facticity (the serious man). The adventurer alone does justice to both his freedom
and his facticity, but he too fails if he does not recognize that his own freedom
depends upon his securing the freedom of others.
The failure of the adventurer is qualitatively different from the failures of these
others because it highlights the indispensable role the Other plays in determining
the ethicality of my existence. Indeed, the limitations of viewing the tension
between freedom and facticity as the sole ground for Beauvoir's ethics is revealed
especially poignantly at this point in her discussion. Before moving on to discuss
the possibilities and failures associated specifically with the Other, however, it is
important to take stock of what is at stake in Beauvoir's depiction of ethical
existence as seeking to affirm freedom as an "absolute end" over and against the
factical demands of the situation.
Precisely because this account is so Sartrean, understanding the ethical
primarily as an exercise of transcendence over the immanent aspects of existence
exposes Beauvoir to the same criticisms Sartre faced regarding the dualist ontology
of L 'etre et le neant (translated into English as Being and Nothingness and hereafter
abbreviated as BN). Not merely the situation as such, but also the individual's own
body is relegated to the sphere of immanence that threatens, if one's will is not
strong enough, to lead one to abandon the movement of transcendence. Indeed, the
claims Beauvoir makes about women's bodies, for instance, in "The Data of
Biology" chapter of The Second Sex, frequently relegate their bodies to the status
of immanent objects that represent an ongoing threat to their transcendence as this
latter is apprehended both by the individual herself and by others.
It is paradoxical, Beauvoir observes, that female members of the species that
is the most independent and individualized are also the most enslaved by the

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requirements of its perpetuation. Menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, all

represent, for Beauvoir, obstacles that women must contend with to realize their
freedom. While, she argues, "the male finds more and more varied ways in which
to employ the forces he is master of; the female feels her enslavement more and
more keenly, the conflict between her own interests and the reproductive forces is
heightened" (SS, 25, emphasis added). Of all female mammals, it is woman,
Beauvoir concludes, "who most dramatically fulfills the call of destiny and most
profoundly differs from her male" (SS, 25).
If freedom and transcendence are associated with escaping the restrictions
placed upon us by our bodies and our situations, and if this latter effort is necessary
to secure an ethical existence, then difficulties arise in assessing the ethicality of
individuals who seem unable to move beyond these constraints or who do not see
the "call of destiny" as constraining in the first place. Beauvoir, as many
commentators have observed, does address the status of such individuals, whom she
often characterizes as "the oppressed." She also recognizes that failure to transcend
the "givens" of existence need not be due to a "weak will" or a desire to escape the
anguish of taking responsibility for one's own choices and the unknown
consequences that follow from them; rather, such failure is often due to the mental
and physical domination of oneself by others, a domination that can lead to what
Beauvoir calls mystification.
4.

MYSTIFICATION AND OPPRESSION

Mystification, she suggests, involves the belief that one has no control over one's
situation, that the givens of the situation wholly constitute the situation as such and
that they alone define its meaning and possibilities. The mystified individual does
not seek to transform the situation through her free choices because she does not see
herself as having any choices to begin with. "Ignorance and error," Beauvoir
asserts, "are facts as inescapable as prison walls" (EA, 38). Although Beauvoir
seeks to differentiate the case of the severely oppressed person from the case of the
subman and the serious man, who also fail to enact their freedom positively, this
description of the phenomenon of mystification-as well as the word
"mystification" itself-suggests that the oppressed individual exists in a state of
false consciousness, unaware of the "true" nature of the situation in which she is
immersed. Ignorance and error, however, are often considered to be morally
blameworthy (especially within a Sartrean framework), and it is because Beauvoir
has not yet seriously addressed the role that others play in enabling or inhibiting my
freedom that this acknowledgment of the constraints placed upon one by an
oppressive situation seems rather unsatisfactory.
Hence it seems clear that Beauvoir cannot give a comprehensive account of
ethical ambiguity if she relies solely upon the opposition between transcendence

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and immanence, since the Other introduces further ambiguities into the situation
with which each of us must contend. Moreover, if we try to reduce the role played
by the Other to that of another for-itself who is also trying to secure (or flee from)
an ethical existence and who, in doing so, may engage in projects that often conflict
with and even threaten my own, then the Other becomes another potential obstacle
to my freedom rather than a means of achieving it.
It is a virtue ofBeauvoir's account that she moves away from both Sartre's and
her own negative descriptions of the inevitable conflicts that characterize
intersubjective relationships to introduce and defend the claim that my own freedom
requires (rather than merely tolerating) the freedom of others. And if one begins an
examination ofBeauvoir's ethics by unpacking the significance of this latter claim,
a claim that is made not once but several times across different works, the focus of
her ethics changes dramatically.
5.

ETHICS AND THE OTHER

One danger of viewing an ethics predicated on the opposition between

transcendence and immanence as the sole voice in Beauvoir's work is that we fail
to see how she moves beyond not only the Cartesian ontological framework
employed by Sartre, but also Hegel's depiction of the "master-slave dialectic" as
models for intersubjective relationships! In both Sartre's and Hegel's accounts of
what Sartre calls "being-for-others," my relations to others are characterized by
structural inequalities that must continually be renegotiated but can never be
eradicated. Garcin's famous proclamation that "hell is-other people" in Sartre's
play No Exit, and Sartre's claim that "I grasp the Other's look at the very center of
my act as the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities" (BN, 352) are
just two examples of the constant conflict that marks our relations with others in his
work. If the look of the Other, as Sartre asserts, reveals no more and no less than
"my transcendence transcended," then it is indeed difficult to see how the Other can
be other than an obstacle to the exercise of my freedom.
It cannot be denied that Beauvoir also repeatedly emphasizes the inevitable
conflicts that characterize intersubjective relationships. "To be sure," she tells us
in The Second Sex, "every human relationship implies conflict, all love brings
jealousy" (SS, 347). And yet, as one contemporary Beauvoir scholar has
persuasively argued, this conflictual model of intersubjectivity, a model that is so
in keeping with both Sartre's and Hegel's respective accounts, is not the only
framework to which Beauvoir appeals in order to describe our relations with

1 See Debra Bergoffen, The Philosophy ofSimone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (Albany, NY: State University ofNew York Press, 1997).

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others. 2 For instance, in The Second Sex, Beauvoir also describes the possibility of
an ethical, erotic encounter between two lovers in which neither dominates the
other, and in which each recognizes the transcendence of the other (SS, 401 ). In this
encounter, the two lovers freely give themselves to one another without one seeking
to entrap the other or to lose herself in the other. As Beauvoir observes, "Under a
concrete and carnal form there is mutual recognition of the ego and of the other in
the keenest awareness of the other and of the ego" (SS, 401).
This mutual celebration of the intertwining of my own freedom and facticity
with that of the other offers a positive model of ethical engagement that moves us
beyond the limitations of the for-itself/in-itself and transcendence/immanence
dichotomies. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen how well the early version of
Beauvoir's existential ethics, with its emphasis on individual freedom and
responsibility for one's situation, can simultaneously encourage the development
oflong-lasting, nonhierarchical relationships with others outside as well as within
the erotic domain.
The key to reconciling my own freedom with an affirmation of the freedom of
the other whose projects may and often do conflict with my own lies in Beauvoir's
conception of the "existential conversion" that she claims is necessary to transform
my original freedom into moral or genuine freedom. I perform this existential
conversion by willing myself free, a paradoxical project insofar as I actively will
to possess the freedom I already possess. Moreover, Beauvoir claims that I must
will to possess my freedom in an indefinite movement, that is, I must actively
affirm my freedom through all of my actions in such a fashion that my freedom will
realize itself through its own self-perpetuating movement. One danger of willing
my freedom, however, is that I may end up willing it in the form of the in-itself, that
is, as something given, rather than as a perpetual accomplishment. The opposite
danger is that I will become so entranced with the movement of transcendence that
is synonymous with my freedom that I will fail to realize my freedom in a specific
project, a project that in tum will result in a concrete tranforrnation of my situation.
We can better understand these dangers as well as how to avoid them through
Beauvoir's distinction between what she calls the "will to be" and the "will to
disclose" the world of my concern. Both draw upon my freedom. The will to be,
however, causes my freedom to tum against itself by willing itself as facticity (and
this is precisely what Beauvoir accuses the serious man of doing). The will to
disclosure, she suggests, reveals the limits of the will to be precisely because it is
attuned to the ambiguities of human existence that preclude fixed and fmal
meanings. According to Beauvoir, "the disclosure implies a perpetual tension to
keep being at a certain distance, to tear oneself from the world, and to assert oneself

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as a freedom" (EA, 23-24). Thus the requirements for ethical existence demand that
I disengage myself from the world in order to make its disclosure possible, but I
must also exercise my transcendence concretely upon the world of my concern
through the pursuit of a specific project. For if the will to disclose the world does
not issue in action, then it becomes an empty intellectual exercise, devoid of ethical
significance.
Whereas death would seem to present a natural limit to my efforts to will my
freedom in an indefinite movement, Beauvoir argues that "just as life is identified
with the will-to-live, freedom always appears as a movement ofliberation.lt is only
by prolonging itself through the freedom of others that it manages to surpass death
itself and to realize itself as an indefmite unity" (EA, 32). Insofar as the will to
disclose the world discloses a world in which I coexist with others, I cannot will to
disclose the world without willing that the world should be equally disclosed to
them. And Beauvoir suggests that this is a movement that I will to continue even
when I am no longer part of that world and when other wills must take up my
projects and transform them.
6. AN EMBODIED ETHICS

I earlier claimed that the varying interpretations offered ofBeauvoir' s ethics depend
largely upon which of her existential concepts is used as the starting point for
analysis. While Beauvoir's emphasis upon ethically realizing my freedom through
the transformation of the givens of my situation relies primarily upon the notion of
transcendence (and thereby sets up a tension between transcendence and
immanence that makes the situation of the oppressed individual who does not
and/or cannot seek to alter the situation extremely problematic), she also recognizes
that my freedom is dependent upon the freedom of others and that actively working
toward the latter is the only way of giving lasting meaning to the former. Clearly,
the notion of transcendence has not been abandoned with this focus on my relations
with others; quite the contrary, the intersubjective dimensions of my existence
deepen the significance of human transcendence by presenting it as a collective
achievement rather than an individual project. The question remains, however, how
a collective affirmation of human freedom can be achieved in and through the
various conflicts and tensions that mark intersubjective existence.
Perhaps the most serious challenge to the possibility ofprolonging my freedom
through assisting in the realization of the freedom of others is offered through an
extended autobiographical example provided by Beauvoir herself-namely her
description ofher mother's fmal illness and subsequent death from stomach cancer
in Une mort tres douce (1964; translated and published in English as A Very Easy
Death, 1965). This autobiographical narrative itself has an ambiguous place in
Beauvoir's work. It is not fiction, not philosophy, and not quite like her earlier

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autobiographies either, since the focus is not primarily on herselfbut on her mother,
Franc;oise de Beauvoir. 3 Despite the fact that it is by no means a formal ethical
treatise and has not received much philosophical attention, it is an important work
to discuss because it offers a very poignant description of the challenges that
deception poses to ethics.
In the course of A Very Easy Death, Beauvoir reveals the limits not only of a
Kantian, disembodied ethics, but also a Sartrean morality that seems inevitably to
align any form of deception with bad faith. Moreover, I would argue that the ethics
that appears in an unthematized form in this narrative cannot be subsumed within
the disclosure of individual freedom discussed in The Ethics ofAmbiguity or within
the model of mutually confirming subjectivities that Beauvoir provides in the erotic
encounter described in The Second Sex. This is because neither of these accounts
can do justice to the paradoxically enabling consequences of the deception
practiced by Beauvoir and her sister toward their mother in the face of her
impending death.
In A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir painstakingly describes the roles
she, her sister, the doctors, and the nurses all played in deceiving her mother about
the seriousness of her illness and the imminence of her death. Beauvoir willfully
(albeit with much anguish) participates in the deception, because she recognizes
that although her mother tacitly knows that she is dying, Franc;oise is not
emotionally, intellectually, or physically equipped to acknowledge the diagnosis
explicitly. Significantly, Beauvoir's participation in her mother's self-deception
appears within the text to be an ethical response to her mother's desire even though
this desire demands responses that are at odds with Beauvoir's own ethical
inclinations. These latter, rejecting the path of willful self-deception, privilege the
lucid evaluation of the situation that characterizes the will to disclosure.
An emphasis on lucidity and a disavowal of deception is not only a key feature
ofBeauvoir's and Sartre's existential frameworks, but also is foundational to the
Kantian, deontological model and to the entire rationalist tradition. Indeed, Kant
argues that we must abstract from the particularities of the individuals involved in
a given situation in order to determine a universal ethical response to that situation.
Insofar as a moral response, for Kant, rests solely on reason and must be applicable
to any situation in which questions of deceiving another might arise, his ethics
demands that we ignore those aspects ofFranc;oise de Beauvoir's personality that
explain her desire for deception.
Undoubtedly, there are many individuals (including Simone de Beauvoir
herself) who would prefer the additional suffering that comes with knowing the

Beau voir pursues a similar strategy in her later volume Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre,
trans. Patrick O'Brian (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
3

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truth to any relief from suffering that might follow from allowing oneself to be
deceived about one's situation. Moreover, the wish to be deceived, as Sartre points
out in Being and Nothingness, is itself contradictory and doomed to failure, since
one must know what one wants to be deceived about in order to engage actively in
the project of self-deception. Despite these and other difficulties with the project of
self-deception, much less Fran9oise's tacit demand that her daughters assist her in
realizing this project, a surprising, very un-Kantian and un-Sartrean result occurs
from the family's collusion-namely, Fran9oise de Beauvoir experiences a sense
of moral agency that she has perhaps never before realized (or at least has not
realized since her childhood and early adolescence). The affirmation that she can
demand and receive respect and consideration from others because of her bodily
suffering, Beauvoir implicitly suggests, is precisely what allows Fran9oise to
experience the transcendent dimensions of her own embodiment in the final days
of her life.
What is paramount here, just as in the erotic encounter discussed earlier, is an
affirmation ofthe other as subject rather than as object. As a distinctively embodied
subjectivity, the desires of the other can never be reducible to my own. However,
the "bodily imperatives" that motivate Beauvoir's acceptance of her mother's
wishes cannot be done justice through the model of an erotic relationship (though
there are undoubtedly, as Freud and even Beauvoir herself point out, strong erotic
dimensions in the child's relation to her mother). 4 The insufficiency of the erotic
model provided in The Second Sex to account for these bodily imperatives becomes
abundantly clear when these latter emerge from the bodies of strangers or even from
my own body.
The poignant picture Beauvoir offers in A Very Easy Death of an ethical
relationship between a mother and her daughters that paradoxically arises through
a shared deception requires a rethinking of the sufficiency of earlier existentialist
as well as deontological models in providing a comprehensive account of our moral
possibilities. This means that there is much more work to be done if we are to
plumb the depths of Beauvoir's ethical insights. The challenge of such a project
should not discourage us, however, since as Beauvoir herself notes in The Ethics
ofAmbiguity, "There is an ethics only if there is a problem to solve" (EA, 18).
In closing, I would argue that the tensions that arise among the various
depictions of ethical encounters that Beauvoir offers, must be taken not as a failure
on her part, but as emblematic of the multiple ambiguities that characterize human

For an in-depth discussion of the expression "bodily imperatives" please see chapter
seven of my Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1999).
This term is intended to stress the tension between Beauvoir's embodied ethics and Kant's
categorical imperative.
4

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existence, ambiguities that we must all contend with on a daily basis. If it is indeed
true, as she observes, that "without failure, no ethics," (EA, 10), then we must seek
ethics in and through this failure rather than by striving to transcend the very need
for ethics itself.

SELECTED BIBUOGRAPHY

Primary Sources
Beauvoir, Simone de. Pyrrhus et Cineas. Paris: Gallimard, 1944.
---.Pour une morale de I 'ambiguite. Paris: Gallimard, 1947; The Ethics ofAmbiguity.
Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library 1948; rpt. Citadel Press,
1997.
- - - . Le deuxieme sexe. 2 vo1s. Paris: Gallimard, 1949; The Second Sex. Trans. H.M.
Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1952; rpt. Vintage, 1989.
- - - . Une mort tres douce. Paris: Gallimard, 1964; A Very Easy Death. Trans. Patrick
O'Brian. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
- - - . La Ceremonie des adieux suivi de Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre. AoutSeptembre 1974. Paris: Gallimard, 1981; Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Trans. Patrick
O'Brian. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Hegel, G.W.F. Phiinomenologie des Geistes [1806]; The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans.
J.B. Baillie. London: MacMillan, 1910.
Kant, Immanuel. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [1785]; Groundwork of the
Metaphysic of Morals. Trans. H.J. Paton. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. L 'etre et le neant. Paris: Gallimard, 1943; Being and Nothingness. Trans.
Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.
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