Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler

A Different Kind of Universality: Beauvoir and Kant on Universal Ethics

55 A Different Kind of universality Beauvoir and Kant on Universal Ethics William S. Wilkerson at the limit, the Beauvoirian ethics would take place under the sign of its own impossibility. this is not to suggest that it would simply not take place or that there is no Beauvoirian ethics, but rather that a Beauvoirian ethics must be affirmed as paradoxical. —Penelope Deutscher Beauvoir’s ethics reconciles individual freedom with the need for the other. from her moral conversion during the war,1 through the moral and philosophical essays of the 1940s, to Le deuxième sexe and Les Mandarins, one idea characterizes this reconciliation: all free individuals have a reciprocal need for the other, which only mutual generosity satisfies. another’s freedom both completes and sustains my freedom. Generosity must ground these reciprocal relationships, because granting freedom to others means that i can demand nothing. i can only appeal to their generosity. freely responding to others’ freedom is thus a pure gift, because it expects nothing in exchange. yet paradoxically, this gift is in all of our interests: Beauvoir thinks that any who seek justification and freedom must desire both their own and others’ freedom as a part of their own fulfillment (Beauvoir 1976, 24, 72; Beauvoir 2008c 32, 91–92).2 two important conclusions follow from this ethical perspective: 1. no pregiven or ready-made moral law determines my response to the other’s appeal in advance and independently of our situation. Beauvoir ’s ethics offers no equivalent to kant’s categorical imperative. two or more individual freedoms cannot, in principle, decide in advance how to live together, how to resolve conflict, or even how to fulfill their own interests, since freedom must always adapt itself to situation and since our continual surpassing renders our futures unknown and totally open. We can be guided by our generosity and our desire for 56 Be au voir anD WeStern t h ouGh t freedom and justification, but this guidance leads me only to openness to another real individual, and to the uncertain possibilities we face: “to treat the other as a freedom so that his end may be freedom; in using this conducting wire one will have to incur the risk, in each case, of an original solution” (Beauvoir 1976, 142; Beauvoir 2008c 176–177). 2. If there is an imperative in Beauvoir’s ethics—and it is not clear that there is—it is decidedly hypothetical and practical. Seeking justification leads me to generosity and to the other, but fulfilling these needs comes by virtue of my own need and desire for justification and freedom. “Contrary to the formal rigor of kantianism that considers the act as more virtuous as it is more abstract, generosity seems to us to be better grounded . . . the less distinction there is between the other and ourselves and the more we fulfill ourselves in taking the other as an end” (Beauvoir 1976, 144; Beauvoir 2008c 178). as a consequence, her counsels on ethical living often have the character of practical advice for living a creative, free kind of living. Similarly, much of the discussion of the independent woman in The Second Sex amounts to practical guidance for women to negotiate their oppression.3 this practical advice, combined with a lack of a universal principal and Beauvoir’s own desire to create a life in literature and autobiography, have led some, like karen vingtes, to claim that Beauvoir presents an ethic that avoids imperatives altogether. rather, her ethics offers an “art of living” similar to foucault’s care of the self.4 Certainly, by offering no ready-made ethical principle and eschewing the ideal of ethical universality in favor of practical advice, Beauvoir rejects the kantian ethic of an a priori universal principle that is absolute and completely binding. yet her most sustained, complex, and explicitly ethical work,The Ethics of Ambiguity, speaks of an “ethics of autonomy” with a universal requirement of freedom (Beauvoir 1976, 24; Beauvoir 2008c, 32), a want for all people to be free (Beauvoir 1976, 86–87; Beauvoir 2008c, 108), and a “principle of action” (principe d’action) whose range is universal (Beauvoir 1976, 23; Beauvoir 2008c, 32). indeed, the seemingly kantian features of this book have been a constant source of difficulty and irritation for both Beauvoir and her interpreters. Beauvoir told biographer Deirdre Bair that she was using kantian ideas and style when she was writing it (Bair 1990, 271), even though her own autobiography famously claimed that...