ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an interpretation of the meta-ethical—and more broadly, meta-evaluative—ideas developed or adumbrated in Jean-Paul Sartre’s early philosophical works, in the period from the late 1930s to the Notebooks for an Ethics, written between 1945 and 1948. Sartre’s Freedom Thesis is one of his central commitments and perhaps the most widely criticized among his philosophical claims. Nothing outside consciousness grounds or motivates its choices; rather, consciousness is itself the ungrounded ground of values. For Sartre, inauthentic existence—existence fleeing or denying its own freedom—is necessarily unethical. One of the most distinctive features of Sartre’s thinking on ethics is that abstract principles about what morally ought to be done typically leave out crucial aspects of ethical responsibility. Many real-life situations exhibit the kind of structure illustrated by the example of the student, and this structure is at the heart of what Sartre would agree are genuine ethical dilemmas.
