Existentialist Ethics

Existentialism is a way of thinking about life that starts from the single person. It stresses freedom, choice and personal responsibility.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a French philosopher. He is closely linked with existentialist ethics.

What does the famous phrase mean?

Sartre’s phrase is “existence precedes essence”. Here, essence means a fixed nature or purpose. The phrase says you are not born with one.

Sartre put it in one line. “Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.”

What is a simple example?

Sartre’s own example is a paper-knife. Its maker had its purpose in mind before making it. A person is different. Nobody fixes your purpose in advance. You build it through what you do.

Does every existentialist say life has no given meaning?

No. That view belongs to Sartre’s atheist version. In his version, no God hands down a purpose, so each person must make one. Religious existentialists see it differently, as the next card shows.

No. Sartre himself said there are two kinds of existentialists.

• Christian existentialists: Sartre named Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel.
• Atheist existentialists: Sartre placed Martin Heidegger, the French existentialists and himself here.

Søren Kierkegaard is also a religious existentialist. So the movement has both secular and religious voices. Secular means not based on religion.

Is existentialism one school with one system?

No. It is not a single, tidy school. Its main thinkers hold very different views. Only Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir openly called themselves “existentialists”.

Who came first?

• Nineteenth century: Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche laid the early groundwork.
• Twentieth century: German philosophers Edmund Husserl, Heidegger and Jaspers carried the ideas forward.

Sartre said we are “condemned to be free” because no outside rule makes our choices for us. Freedom is not a comfortable gift. It is a heavy responsibility.

Why “condemned”?

We did not create ourselves. Yet we are free from the moment we are thrown into the world. So we are responsible for everything we do. We cannot blame fate, God or “human nature”.

What three feelings come with this freedom?

Sartre named three: anguish, abandonment and despair.

• Anguish: the weight of knowing that your choice sets an example for all people.
• Abandonment: God does not exist, so no outside rule rescues you. You decide what you are.
• Despair: you rely only on what lies within your own will.

What does this look like at work?

A civil servant says, “I only followed the rulebook.” In Sartre’s terms, that official still chose to follow it. The rulebook cannot make the choice. Only the person applying it can.

Sartre gave his pupil no rule. He said only: “You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent.”

What was the pupil’s problem?

The story comes from the same lecture. The facts are these.

• The pupil’s elder brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940.
• His father leaned towards being a “collaborator”, someone who worked with the German occupiers.
• His mother lived alone with him.
• He could go to England and join the Free French Forces.
• Or he could stay near his mother and help her to live.

The mother was grieving her eldest son. The pupil was her one comfort.

Why did Sartre refuse to give advice?

Sartre said no rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do. Even picking an adviser decides in advance what advice you will get. So the pupil alone had to choose, and become the person that choice made him.

What is a common mistake about this story?

Some retellings say he chose between “joining the resistance” and caring for an “aging” mother. The lecture says the Free French Forces in England. It does not call the mother aging.

Bad faith is Sartre’s term for pretending you have no real choice. You tell yourself “I had to do it” or “that’s just how things are”. You do this to escape the discomfort of your own freedom and responsibility.

What is Sartre’s own example?

Sartre describes a café waiter. The waiter plays the role of “waiter” so completely, in his movements, tone and manner, that he treats the role as his fixed identity.

He hides from a simple fact. Being a waiter is still a choice he renews each day. Sartre put it this way: “I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not.”

Where is bad faith in daily life?

“The system made me do it” is a classic bad-faith line. It hides a choice behind a role.

Authenticity means owning your choices honestly. Existentialist ethics has no fixed list of moral rules. But it does insist on authenticity, rather than following the crowd or hiding behind excuses.

How did Sartre define it?

Sartre called it “a lucid consciousness of the situation”. Lucid means clear-sighted. You see your situation clearly, and you accept the responsibilities and risks it brings.

Heidegger also wrote about authenticity. He gave much of the second half of Being and Time to it.

An example: the official who disagrees

This example is our own reading, not Sartre’s.

An official privately disagrees with a policy but carries it out anyway. On this view, the official can still act authentically. The test is whether they see the situation clearly and own the choice. Hiding behind “I was just following orders” would fail that test.

Did Sartre write a full ethics?

Not in his big book. Being and Nothingness ends with a footnote that promises an ethics. He treated authenticity at more length in his Notebooks for an Ethics.

Sartre said that when you choose, you choose an image of what a person should be. In his words, “In fashioning myself I fashion man.”

So he asks a hard question of every choice. “What would happen if everyone did so?”

How is this like Kant?

The idea echoes Kant’s own test, covered in our Kantian Ethics lesson. Kant asked whether you could will your action as a rule for everyone. Sartre reaches a similar point from radical freedom, not from reason alone.

Why does this matter?

It gives existentialism a shared sense of responsibility. Freedom is personal, but its effects are not.

Simone de Beauvoir added the social side. In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), she argued that I cannot affirm my own freedom without affirming the freedom of others.

What did she say we must do?

She said we are responsible for the conditions of freedom. These include two things.

• Material conditions: a minimal standard of living.
• Political conditions: uncensored discourse and association.

Why does this matter?

It answers a common charge. Critics say existentialism only cares about the lonely individual. Beauvoir shows that my freedom depends on other people’s freedom too.

On this reading, a civil servant’s own freedom is tied to public duty. Protecting citizens’ freedoms becomes part of acting well.

Her best-known book, The Second Sex, followed in 1949.

Albert Camus was a French writer and philosopher. He explored the absurd. The absurd is the clash between our wish for meaning and a universe that offers none on its own.

How should we live with the absurd?

Camus did not answer with despair. He said we should still choose to live fully and act with integrity. No final cosmic justification is needed.

Picture a person asking a silent universe “why?” and getting no answer. Camus’s reply was defiant, deliberate living anyway.

Was Camus an existentialist?

Camus denied being an existentialist. His friendship with Sartre got him the label. But he preferred not to be linked with any ideology. Still, The Myth of Sisyphus belongs squarely in the existentialist tradition.

What are the key facts about his life?

• Born: 7 November 1913, in Mondovi, French Algeria.
• Novel: his novel The Stranger, in June 1942.
• Nobel Prize: Literature, 1957.
• Died: 4 January 1960.

The essay turns to the Sisyphus story. Its famous line is “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” The essay appeared in October 1942.

What is the myth?

Sisyphus is a figure from Greek myth. He is condemned to push a boulder up a hill forever. Each time, it rolls back down. Camus uses him as a symbol of a life that seems meaningless.

Why happy?

The line just before gives the reason: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

So the point is not a final purpose or success. The struggle itself is enough.

What is the common mistake?

Some summaries say Sisyphus finds “purpose” in pushing. Camus’s actual word is happy. Remember the exact line.

Existentialism took off in mid-twentieth-century France, after the Second World War.

What shaped its mood?

The war, the Nazi death camps and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shook old beliefs. A whole generation had to face death, freedom and meaninglessness.

Old ideas of automatic moral progress felt broken. Existentialism offered a way to act with purpose and responsibility anyway.

When did Sartre’s ideas reach the public?

• 1943: Sartre published Being and Nothingness, his big and difficult book.
• Late 1945: thousands of Parisians packed into his lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism.
• 1946: the lecture was published. It gave an easier version of his ideas.

Critics say it gives little. By rejecting fixed rules, existentialism offers no firm answer for a hard choice.

What is the critics’ example?

A civil servant is torn between a superior’s order and their own conscience. “Be authentic” alone does not say which way to go. Critics argue that a firm rule is exactly what such a moment needs.

How would Sartre reply?

In our reading, Sartre would say the missing rule is the whole point. He told his pupil that no rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do. Guidance by rule is the very thing he denies.

So the criticism is real, but Sartre accepts it as a fact of human life.

Existentialist ideas about individual responsibility connect to civil-service ethics in a real way. A rule or a superior’s order does not remove a person’s own responsibility for a decision.

What is the takeaway?

Even inside a large institution, this tradition would say, an individual official remains responsible for the choices they personally make.

• Condemned to be free: “I only followed the rulebook” is still a choice.
• Bad faith: “The system made me do it” hides that choice.
• Beauvoir: an official’s freedom is tied to the freedom of citizens.

Names, dates and labels are the usual traps. Check each one against this list.

1. Sartre declined; Camus won. Sartre was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature and declined it. Camus won it in 1957.
2. 1943 vs 1946. Being and Nothingness came out in 1943. The lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism was published in 1946.
3. Beauvoir’s two books. The Ethics of Ambiguity is from 1947. The Second Sex is from 1949.
4. Camus and the label. Camus denied being an existentialist.
5. Sisyphus. The line is “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”, not “finding purpose”.
6. Christian vs atheist. Jaspers and Marcel are Christian existentialists. Sartre is an atheist one.

The Nobel citation for Sartre praised work “filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth”. Camus’s citation praised work that “illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times”.