ABSTRACT
Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity, argues the ideal ethical relationship is one whereby we will the freedom of others; she terms this moral freedom. A few years later Beauvoir's rigorous investigation of woman's sociohistorical situation troubles moral freedom: How is it possible to will the freedom of others if one's own freedom is attenuated? Indeed, Beauvoir’s careful attention to the history of women's lived experience in The Second Sex seemingly belies her lofty existentialist ethics. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Beauvoir denounces The Ethics of Ambiguity as overly theoretical. Despite the fact that Beauvoir's attention to woman's situation complicates her ethics, it is my contention that her moral philosophy be revived, so that it may assume its much deserved place in the Western canon. Unpacking Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity and then outlining her account of the gaze in The Second Sex, while borrowing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the visible, allows me to pull together her two distinct readings of intersubjectivity from the 1940s. The result is a viable (embodied) existentialist ethics.
