The Ethics of Ambiguity (French title: Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté) is Simone de Beauvoir's second major non-fiction work, nearly twice as long as her first, Pyrrhus and Cineas. After giving a lecture in 1945, she found herself claiming that it was impossible to base an ethic upon the foundations of Sartre's Being and Nothingness (French title: L'Être et le néant), and a year later she took up the challenge, taking some six months over the task and publishing the text first in installments in Les Temps modernes, then as a book in November 1947.
Famous quotes containing the words ethics and/or ambiguity:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.”
—Thomas Reid (1710–1769)