Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar (Tuesday - Week 8, MT23)

Beauvoir's ethical thought, and existentialism broadly, has recently been discussed in connection with virtue ethics: Christine Daigle has hinted, without elaboration, that Beauvoir's ethics can be seen as a non-Aristotelian kind of virtue ethics; Kate Kirkpatrick has noted the importance of exemplars for both Beauvoir and virtue ethics; Jonathan Webber has characterized existentialism as having a strong eudaimonistic element; and Peter Antich has asked whether an existentialist virtue ethics is possible. I want to expand on these suggestions (and answer Antich's question in the positive) by arguing that Beauvoir's ethical thought is, or is compatible with, a virtue ethics along broadly neo-Aristotelian lines. These compatibilities include Beauvoir's critique of other ethical theories including consequentialism and Kantianism/deontology, her agent-centred (rather than action-centred) focus, her insistence on the non-codifiability of ethics into rules or principles, and a connection between the importance Aristotle places on prohairesis (choice) and what Beauvoir calls willing moral freedom. As well as noting these parallels, I will argue that putting Beauvoir's ethical thought and virtue ethics 'into dialogue' is mutually illuminating. If Beauvoir is read as a kind of virtue ethicist, her insistence that living authentically requires willing the freedom of others along with one's own freedom can help to foreground the need, in Aristotelian virtue ethics, for at least some others to be virtuous in order to be virtuous oneself. And reading Beauvoir as a virtue ethicist can help to show how her ethics might translate into practice in the absence of rules for right action.

Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar Convenors: Joseph Schear, Manuel Dries, Kate Kirkpatrick and Mark Wrathall