Ambiguity's Ambiguous Ethics

"You can't offer ethics to a God" – Simone De Beauvoir (Ethics of ambiguity)

Simone de Beauvoir says this in her more important work of existentialist ethics but I often wonder can you offer an ethics to a person you treat like a god? What about a king or a queen? If we cut the bullshit, ethics is simply an opinion with very good reasoning. The Ethics of Ambiguity Simone De Beauvoir argues is one that has very good reasoning but with an irrational premise– that we can't stick with defining one another as only a subject or an object, one must deal with the ambiguity that lies in the heart of human existence. So reasoning isn't simply a rational, logical ruleset, at least for human beings. We are an irrational man, "condemned to be free" as Sartre put it. 

Before jumping ship onto the freedom train that awaits us in the end of the Ethics of Ambiguity, we must consider the structure and phenomena that Simone De Beauvoir shapes her ethics. She has put herself the daunting task of taking what she admits to be ambiguous beings and offer them an ethics. It's like trying to fit a shapeless material into a square hole– it doesn't really matter to the former, but how the latter structures the experiment to identify it. Sure the flowy matter may conform to fitting through the square hole or act like a circle peg and not fit. Whether or not we act upon that abstract entity, it is entirely free from our influence but yet we are the ones who structure their approach. This approach seems wishy washy and some may jump ship and focus on more concretely defined principles of what human beings are in order to structure the ethics to have a sound foundation (i.e. man is a rational animal). 

But that kind of approach is too cookie cutter, and would cause no qualm among the beings who decide to adhere to the ethics given unless they are human beings. There's a reason why we constantly argue about ethics and it's not just because it's an opinion on how one should live. Rather, it's an opinion on how we live already and from there, give the most logical suggestion as to maximize the ultimate goal/telos from what was principally established. But what if the premises are off track? That's particularly why Simone De Beauvoir gives human beings this amount of leeway. She acknowledges the polarizing effect of providing an ethics to an individual engaged in a sort of reflective discourse on what or who he/she is– any attempt at defining them would force an ultimatum to some form of "love it or hate it" dichotomy. 

She forms her structure of the kinds of people who would respond to the realization of one's ambiguity. Before that she even lays out the development of a human being born into the world, unaware of the ambiguity of his/her existence up until the point where they start to tackle it. This almost developmental psychologist-esque account of human beings is ultimately necessary for De Beauvoir's point. Those that come across the problem of one's ambiguity and ignore it are rightfully typecast as the "subman" and then the other dialectical side– the ones who acknowledge the ambiguity and throws themselves onto a cause/project– the "serious man". Overcoming these extremities, realizing that the answers to one's ambiguity cannot be given unto him/her then relegating him/herself to a numb apathetic approach to life is categorized as the "nihilistic man". 

These three categories are all cloaked with problems of dealing with ambiguity that Sartre would call being in "bad faith" or Heidegger would consider "inauthentic" behavior. De Beauvoir doesn't just leave us with inauthentic bad faith however. She provides the ethics she wanted framed into this structure of the looseness of human's ambiguous existence, the "free man". The one who realizes the ambiguity of one's existence and the potential meaningless of it all and supplies the meaning herself. She doesn't stop there, she provides the responsibility of the free man to realize that he/she is not completely free if others are not free as well and calls upon the emancipation of all man to dwell on the ambiguity of their individual existences freely. 

Just like those that offered ethics before her, Simone De Beauvoir has described her freeman as the ideal for which one should do when faced with the ambiguity of their existence. And yet, isn't the structure almost too identical to those that offered ethics before her? It appears that the process of unfolding an ethics comes from the similar framework of structuring the view of how people are in reality. Is Simone De Beauvoir simply another iteration of this?

Perhaps, but De Beauvoir has taken the right step in tackling the question of the human being with ambiguity rather than rationalism. The field of economics itself has also learned from their mistakes of equating human beings with being ultra-rationalist creatures who would definitely act in their best interest if they had known better by establishing the field of behavioral economics. What Simone De Beauvoir provides the ethics enthusiast is the realization that the field of ethics itself is an ambiguous field, unable to define itself as a subject or an object of inquiry. Should we discuss ethics for the sake of attaining the maximum field of ethics or should it be an object from which we project our opinionated explanations upon? 

Because De Beauvoir structures her approach to ambiguity by going through the stages of development where one begins without an understanding of human's ambiguity up until their realization of it. This kind of reasoning ultimately provides a foundation for why human beings are ambiguous in the first place. One man may at one day be a sub-man then tomorrow be a free man but was a nihilist last week. We as human beings are in constant inquiry as to what is the best way to live life and it does not take a philosopher's well-polished ethics to do the trick, it's to build up one's own framework on how to structure their goal.

Simone De Beauvoir's goal was to tackle the problem of the ambiguity of human existence and does so in a quasi-ethics standard structure. What makes her redefine the standard system of structure is to import irrationalism qua ambiguity. And so this kind of import should be done as an ethics in itself (I'd call it a metaethics but that would be imprecise), what should we do to live life to the fullest as human beings and what is our condition? 

Our condition is defined by awareness of our existence (Heidegger's "Dasein") and how we project care onto the world through it. The way we project it is in our practical engagement with the world. Why am I reflecting on how I should live my life? The clues lie in what we do, and why we do it. 

We don't just simply do things for one reason, claiming so would be incomplete. We are ultimately striving for something, and that's defined by what we do. We hammer nails into wood for the sake of putting two pieces of wood together (quintessential Heideggerian example). Not only for this do we hammer nails into wood, we do so in order to build a house. Not only this but we hammer nails into wood to build a shelter for Dasein (Heidegger). This is a teleological engagement– an approach to understanding our actions based on for what goals we do so.

The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe coined the term consequentialist ethics to define ethical systems that look at the consequences of the action– the "effects" on whoever is concerned as being significantly effected either badly or goodly. One may confuse this approach with teleology but would be mistaken fundamentally unless one looks at the consequences of the action in relation to the goal of what one had in mind when performing the action in question. Anscombe also wrote about intention and how a person intends to do an action has multiple layers. Think "I put 10 bottles of hot sauce on the pasta with the intention of making it spicy" as one example of an inadequate explanation of teleological engagement. 

All of these approaches come back to the same foundation of ethics– having its own goals the main influencer on the way they give solutions to their definitions of the regular behavior of human being engagement with the world. I can't stress this enough, it was a brilliant step in the right direction for De Beauvoir to follow this tradition by importing the notion of human's ambiguous existence. 

Only with this premise set can we move along the proper kind of ethics offered to human beings and not to a god, queen or rational animal. Ultimately it is us, the shapeless beings we are, fitting ourselves on different polygons that we commit ourselves to with a train of intentions driven by our practical everyday actions.