Simone de Beauvoir's Existentialist Ethics: What the Visible Can Teach Us About the Ethical

This thesis is an investigation into Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist ethics and the problem that woman's situation presents in realizing that ethics. I argue that Beauvoir does not take her existential-phenomenological commitments far enough given the ontological influence of Sartre on her ethics. By failing to truly push her phenomenological thinking her examination of woman's situation risks closing off a brilliant ethics that accounts for the complexity of the human reality. I show that Beauvoir's ethics can speak to contemporary Western woman's situation if Beauvoir takes seriously the implications of her notion of disclosure and brings it to bear on the patriarchal power-terrain of contemporary Western culture. Disclosure creates a bridge by way of appropriating and recognizing the possibilities for reciprocity. Disclosure demonstrates that we cannot simply close down the ethical relationship by reducing the other to a body-object, thus woman's situation as body-object is not final rather it is creatively co-constituted through her interaction with the other. In thinking through the possibilities for intersubjective relationships this thesis unpacks the ontological, ethical, and existential-phenomenological work of Beauvoir and brings her into dialogue with her predecessors and colleagues. In order to push Beauvoir's phenomenological thinking on intersubjectivity beyond her original formulation, I turn to the work of Maurice Merleau-Panty, who assists me in achieving a viable existentialist ethics by way of the visible.