ABSTRACT
If there are values only because they are generated by the projects we pursue, as Sartre thinks is the case, then what implications does this have for ethics? Does it restrict the arena of valid moral theorising to those relativist theories that allow moral value to depend solely on individual preferences? Does it go even further and require us to accept the nihilist view that nothing really matters at all? Sartre has often been understood as committed to either relativism or nihilism in ethics. It is certainly true, as we have seen, that he thinks that all values, positive and negative, depend on the goals of our projects and on the means to achieving those goals: considered apart from our projects, in his view, reality consists only of brute being-in-itself devoid of value. ‘Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is the leader of nations’, he is often quoted as saying (B&N: 646-7).
