The Ethics of Ambiguity

Name: The Ethics of Ambiguity
Author: Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir

— 1947 —

“

Where Sartre declared freedom and left you staring at the void, Beauvoir asks the harder question: what do you DO with that freedom?

The record

Time
An eveningA season
164 pages, about 3 hours: half the length of a typical book on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climb
Two readers report struggling with the terminology of Part One; one found the book easier to follow after it.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else does
Four reviews read it as the ethics Sartre promised in Being and Nothingness and an easier way into existentialism than his prose.

on the six personas
“a brilliant list of six different types of personas who try to evade their freedom”
a book blog
on the subjectivism charge
“de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity is definitely not a form of ethical subjectivism”
Charlotte Moore · Philosophy Now, 2008
on the existential concepts
“Beauvoir does an outstanding job explaining basic existential concepts”
a book blog
on the Stoicism comparison
“I liked all the comparison to stoicism in particular”
five stars · an Amazon review

on the opening chapter
“I found the beginning of the book somewhat difficult to get through.”
five stars · an Amazon review
on the English translation
“the quality of the translation makes it hard to understand some of the text”
three stars · an Amazon review
on the ends and means
“De Beauvoir seems here to revert to a run-of-the-Mill utilitarianism, but with existentialist freedom”
a book blog
on the first essay
“the first essay has a lot of beings and existences and other such terminology”
a book blog