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:
“The vanity of the sciences. Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women—the quality of shifting from child to woman, the seeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, “What does a woman want?””
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)