"I think she opens with this because any systematic approach to ethics should begin with a statement of the writer's understanding of human nature. De Beauvoir defines a specific ambiguity which I discussed in the introduction to this series. Her views are also informed by another ambiguity, the absurd. We want certainty. We want a foundation. But there isn't one. We have to proceed, we have to live, without that certainty we want."
"I agree with the Existentialists, including Sartre, that the universe is indifferent to its parts, from planets to mountains, flowers, insects, animals and human beings. I think there is no meaning to existence apart from our experience of it. Sartre explains that this lack of meaning gives us humans a radical degree of freedom, which we cannot avoid."
Existence combines two linked ambiguities: the absence of inherent meaning and the human desire for certainty, producing the experience of the absurd. The universe is indifferent to people and other entities, so meaning arises only through subjective experience. Radical freedom follows from the lack of preexisting meaning, and that freedom is inescapable and entails responsibility. Ethical thought must therefore begin by accepting human nature as a free, ambiguous condition and by developing norms grounded in how humans respond to meaninglessness. Clear exposition of existential concepts helps clarify the foundations for an ethics addressing ambiguity and the absurd.
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