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:
“If you take away ideology, you are left with a case by case ethics which in practise ends up as me first, me only, and in rampant greed.”
—Richard Nelson (b. 1950)
“Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)