PhiloWikiConceptsPhilosophersBooksInteractive graph

Concept

The Ethics of Ambiguity

Overview

The Ethics of Ambiguity (French: Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté) is Simone de Beauvoir's second major non-fiction work and a philosophical work of existentialist ethics. It was prompted by a lecture she gave in 1945, where she claimed that it was impossible to base an ethical system on her partner Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical work Being and Nothingness (French: L'Être et le néant). The following year, over a six-month period, she took on the challenge, publishing the resulting text first as three installments in Les Temps modernes, (Sartre's Journal, which she also co-founded) in November 1947, as a book.The Ethics of Ambiguity follows the phenomenological tradition.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

  1. Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues. _C. German, or “True,” Socialism_ The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expression of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a…

    Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

    The author is tied to The Ethics of Ambiguity in the knowledge graph.

    Read the chapter · Open in the reader

  2. But in the course of time, the process of the metamorphosis of commodities which produces the different forms of money, transforms also the owners of commodities or changes the character in which they appear before each other in the community. In the process of metamorphosis of the commodity the guardian of the latter changes his skin as often as the commodity changes place or as the money assumes new forms.

    Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

    States what The Ethics of Ambiguity is; the author is tied to The Ethics of Ambiguity in the knowledge graph.

    Read the chapter · Open in the reader

  3. 367. Indeed, confusion springs, more often than not, from ambiguity in terms, and from one's failure to take trouble over gaining clear ideas about them. That gives rise to these eternal, and usually mistaken, contentions on necessity and contingency, on the possible and the impossible. But provided that it is understood that necessity and possibility, taken metaphysically and strictly, depend solely upon this…

    Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil

    States what The Ethics of Ambiguity is.

    Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Philosophers who discussed The Ethics of Ambiguity

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Existentialism.

Explore The Ethics of Ambiguity in the interactive graph →