Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar (Tuesday - Week 6, TT25)
Tuesday 3 June, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Ryle Room, Radcliffe Humanities
Sabina Vaccarino Bremner (Penn): 'Beauvoir's Concept of Ambiguity'
Abstract: Recently, attempts have been made to move past individualistic approaches to metaethical constructivism (the view that value is grounded in features of agency) in order to formulate conceptions of social constructivism, explaining morality as essentially other-directed rather than self-directed. In this talk, I argue that Simone de Beauvoir offers a novel argument that has not yet been captured in the scholarship for a new variant of social constructivism. Beauvoir's constructivism is universalist in its scope, and attempts to establish that morality is objective and absolute. On my reconstruction, Beauvoir claims that what ultimately confers value on our projects is the attempt to simultaneously both create and satisfy the needs of unknown future others by undertaking specific actions in the present. I conclude that Beauvoir's argument appeals to the normative standpoint of socially embedded individuals, but without taking recourse to Hegelian recognition of one another's subjectivity, as other attempts to socially ground normativity do; instead, in line with a strand of thinking in Rousseau and Marx, she locates the source of normativity in the free recognition of the objects of one another's practical activity.
