Abstract: Simone de Beauvoir's ethics has attracted increasing attention in recent years, particularly among analytic philosophers. Yet the concept she herself took to be central to her ethical position, ambiguity, is usually passed over in just one or two sentences. In this talk, I reconstruct Beauvoir's account of ambiguity: ambiguity does not refer primarily to the ambiguous relationship human beings have to their own freedom, as commentators have suggested; instead, it is the condition of vulnerability and dependence on other people, a condition presupposed by the formation of all human beings into independent adults. This condition is one made particularly manifest in certain human experiences Beauvoir focuses on in her own literature and philosophy, such as pregnancy, old age, death, and childhood, but it's also one she takes to be fundamental to being human, whether one actively takes notice of it or not. I take this concept to ground Beauvoir's distinctive brand of ethical constructivism, and to do so more successfully than the other groundings for Kantian, Fichtean, or Hegelian constructivisms that have been proposed. From her concept of ambiguity, I conclude, also derives a distinctive virtue, the virtue of moral invention, or of the activity of creating and realizing new values.
Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar Convenors: Jack Wearing, Joseph Schear, Manuel Dries, Kate Kirkpatrick and Mark Wrathall
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