The Ethics of Ambiguity in Philosophy

Jul 17, 2008 Draco3seven Crawdady rated it really liked it

Shelves: socio-and-cultural-philosophy, existential, western-value-theory

““If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Today’s believers use this formula for their own advantage. To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are ins ““If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Today’s believers use this formula for their own advantage. To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well.”

that was one of my favorite quotes out of this book, there was some other good points she makes, but I still would not recommend this to most... In the end it really promotes a type of passiveness that is most appropriate to the bourgeois intellectual... She is basically putting forward an ethical system representing what some brand as French Existentialism. Key or position of paradigm of this system, is the now state of experiential reality, always perpetually reaffirming itself as “future” moves in to the now. The process by which the now is reaffirmed, is the key central point to her ethical system. The starting point, is the affirmation of the Cartesian ego, then secondly an un-concrete source of stimuli (i.e.” external reality”, the world, ones own perceptions) that is effected, molded, and sometimes created by human action in the plural sense or other human beings. Central to her argument is the rejection of a concrete source of stimuli that has historical continuity (physcalist/materialist determinism), at minimum this is the case at the subjective/ego existential level of here and now… And so one has free will, or the illusion of it in such a way that determinism is disrupted by existence, at the very moment of action by a type of mystical ignorance or temporal experiential subjectivity (awareness isolation to the now). At least from an experiential stand point one is unaware of all of the variables that have led up to the point of action or decision, so in their temporal ignorance can only reaffirm who they are and make an un caused free choice so far as they are unaware of all the variables of causation in that very moment. What this claim then allows for is the conservation of responsibility for one’s own actions. However she does not deny that reality sometimes limits the decisions that can be made, and since reality is influenced and created by humans to some extent, relations of oppression arise or are created, by humans, either culturally, through ignorance, or just dominance… These human/cultural/habitual relations can and do limit peoples freedom… So then the finall point to her system is the struggle and striving for freedom… Freedom from oppresion, but also freedom in the most general form. The ultimate unethical action is then an action of oppression… or the violation to anothers right to the fullest freedom.

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Jul 23, 2013 Alexander rated it really liked it

Shelves: philosophy

Not sure whether to rate this *** or ****, so going for **** out of charity. Beauvoir aims to provide atheistic existentialism with an ethics, which is not an easy task once freedom is made the main 'thing' about humanity. The weakness of the work is that Beauvoir sees that existentialists must go beyond Nietzsche, and beyond Kierkegaard too, but in order to go beyond them Beauvoir has to -- go back to Kant. Yes, Beauvoir foregrounds embodiment in a way that Kant does not, and yes, this is a shr ...more

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