Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar (Tuesday - Week 4, MT23)
Tuesday 31 October, 16:00 - 18:00
Ryle Room, Faculty of Philosophy
Daniela Dover (Merton College, University of Oxford) and Jonathan Gingerich (Rutgers University): 'Freedom and Futurity: Simone de Beauvoir's Moral Psychology'
In this talk we will present the first part of an in-progress monograph on Beauvoir’s moral psychology, metaethics, and normative ethics. We begin by introducing Beauvoir’s distinctive moral psychology. We go on to show how Beauvoir derives substantive ethical conclusions from this moral psychology. In its most general form, the Beauvoirian existential imperative holds that, on pain of unmitigated anxiety, each subject-object ambiguity must will freedom absolutely—‘the man who seeks to justify his life must will freedom itself, first of all and absolutely’ (Beauvoir 1947, 34-35, our translation). This sounds rather abstract, but the arguments by which Beauvoir seeks to establish it help to bring out its concrete implications. Echoing Kant, whose categorical imperative can be stated in three ways that are ultimately, but not obviously, equivalent, we distinguish among what we call three ‘formulations’ of this imperative, each of which corresponds to a step in Beauvoir’s overall argument. Beauvoir begins by arguing that each of us must will our own freedom. Next, she argues that each of us must will the freedom of (at least some) others. And finally, she holds that each of us must will the freedom of all. This in turn requires political action: ‘we must end by abolishing all suppression; each one must carry on his struggle in connection with that of the other and by integrating it into the general pattern’ (EA 89).
