Simone De Beauvoir's The Ethics Of Ambiguity

.

The influence that her surroundings and time period had on Simone de Beauvoir’s thought process was minimally prevalent in her writing and person, as her countercultural ideas were radical at the time, but they do provide an important context in her philosophy, the paramount example of which is shown through her book The Ethics of Ambiguity. She discusses the possibility of existence, states that there is no necessity that we exist and thus there is no predetermined human essence or standard of value, and says that human freedom requires the freedom of others for it to be actualized. She developed a concern with freedom, oppression, and responsibility when she wrote:"to will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision." So to act alone or without concern for others is not to be free. She also introduced the idea that the authentically moral attitude understands that the freedom of the self requires the freedom of others.3

As this book was written after World War II, it is not so surprising that Beauvoir would be concerned with questions of oppression and liberation and the ethical responsibility that each

With The Second Sex, Beauvoir wrote what is now considered to be the bible for second wave feminism, introducing revolutionary ideas that spurred on feminists for generations to come. Beauvoir draws parallels with oppressions of blacks and jews, with a significant difference: women struggle to create solidarity or separatist groups due to the vastness of their issue, and yet depend on men for a sense of accomplishment, companionship, and economic stability, under concepts created by the patriarchy.“One is not born but becomes a woman” She was the first to say on a broad scale that physical differences don’t explain social differences when it pertains to gender, something that is an integral and base platform for all feminism since