The ethics of ambiguity

Overview

A role is lived, not issued in advance. Your freedom is unfinished while someone else’s is ignored. Real limits can still be named.

Simone de Beauvoir starts from a freedom that is not a clean solo. You are free, and the world is full of other freedoms, and a situation can be heavy without being a script. Bad faith is the attempt to hide in the script: I am only this role, so the choice was never mine. The opposite cheat is pretending a real locked door is not there. A prison, a law, a lack of money, a body that will not do what you ask: these can be named. Naming them is not the same as deciding you have no freedom anywhere.

Where it answers

Key terms

Ambiguity

Beauvoir’s word for the human condition: free yet limited, a subject yet also an object to others.

Freedom

Something that becomes real only when we also will the freedom of others.

Situation

The body, history and society within which each person’s freedom has to act.

Oppression

When some people’s freedom is cut off by others, as with women in a world defined by men.

In their words