The Ethics of Ambiguity

⚖The case for it

The first thirty pages are hard going. She piles up terms she never stops to define, writing fast, on deadline, in a hurry to answer people who were not listening. Push through. The argument waiting on the other side is one nobody else in her circle managed. Freedom is worthless in a vacuum, she says; mine is a fiction unless yours is real, which turns existentialism from a permission slip into a debt owed to other people. About 150 pages, and it makes oppression wrong without borrowing a God or a fixed human nature to do it.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Beauvoir later called this the book of hers that most irritated her, and her complaint was fair: the ethics stays abstract, hovering above the actual situations it claims to address. The gallery of evaders (the sub-man, the serious man, the nihilist, the adventurer) is a typology, neat and bloodless. The Sartrean scaffolding she was escaping is still half-attached.

— the honest librarian