Ethics, Responsibility, and Humanism

One of the most common objections Sartre faced was this: if there are no objective moral norms, if each person simply invents their values through their choices, then existentialism has no ethics. Or worse: anything goes. Sartre spends the back half of the lecture trying to show that this objection is wrong. His answer is not entirely convincing — and he knew it.

His first response is to say that choosing for oneself is never a purely private matter. As we saw in the “Existence Precedes Essence” lecture: every choice is a proposal about what a human being can do. You cannot choose without implicitly affirming the kind of choice you are making as one a person in your situation can make. This gives Sartre a way to say that your choices have a kind of universal reach — not that they set a rule for everyone, but that they carry a claim that deserves scrutiny.

His second response involves the concept of freedom itself. If you are making genuine choices — if you are authentically exercising your freedom — then you cannot coherently deny the same freedom to others. You are affirming that freedom is valuable in choosing freely. This looks like a substantive ethical commitment: not to any particular set of values, but to the value of freedom itself, for everyone.

This is thin, and Sartre admits it. He acknowledges that existentialism cannot give you a rule that settles hard moral cases. But he argues that this is not a failure of existentialism — it is a realistic picture of what moral philosophy can actually deliver. No ethical system has ever eliminated the need for individual judgment in concrete situations. Existentialism just refuses to pretend otherwise.

The title of the lecture is a provocation. “Humanism” in the postwar European context typically meant something warm and affirming — a belief in human dignity, reason, progress. Existentialism, with its anguish and despair and bad faith, sounded like the opposite. Sartre wants to claim the word.

His argument is double. First, existentialism is humanism because it takes human freedom seriously — it does not reduce human beings to mechanisms (as materialism tends to), to expressions of divine will (as religious accounts do), or to effects of historical forces (as Marxist accounts risk doing). The human being is, on Sartre’s account, the source of all meaning. Without human consciousness to confer meaning, there is no meaning. That is a form of respect for what is distinctively human.

Second, Sartre explicitly disavows the version of humanism he finds objectionable — one that makes humanity into an end in itself, worships human achievement, treats Man (with a capital M) as an object of admiration. That, he says, is just another form of bad faith: it posits a fixed human essence (admirable, rational, progressive) that individual humans are supposed to conform to. That is essence-before-existence with humanity replacing God.

The humanism Sartre endorses is more modest and more demanding at once. It says: there is no human nature, no fixed ideal. There is only the ongoing, never-completed project of self-creation. Existentialism is a humanism because it is a philosophy of what it actually means to be human, not a philosophy about what humans ideally should be.

The hard question

Here is the tension that the lecture does not fully resolve, and which has occupied Sartre’s critics ever since:

Sartre says there are no objective moral norms. Values are not out there in the world waiting to be discovered. They are created by human choices. There is no standard — outside of human choice — against which choices can be judged.

Sartre also says that bad faith is wrong. Not just psychologically uncomfortable, not just inauthentic in some descriptive sense — but morally wrong, a “failing” in a normative sense. He thinks that dishonesty about one’s freedom is not just a mistake but a culpable evasion.

But if there are no objective norms, on what basis is bad faith wrong? You cannot say “bad faith violates the norm of honesty” if norms are the product of individual choice. Why should anyone care about honesty if they have chosen not to?

Sartre’s defenders have offered several responses. One is that the condemnation of bad faith does not require an objective norm — it follows from the structure of consciousness itself. Bad faith is incoherent because it simultaneously relies on and denies the freedom it requires to perform itself. It is self-undermining in the way a logical contradiction is self-undermining. This does not require an external norm; it requires only consistency.

Another response, more Sartrean in spirit: consciousness, in its very structure, is committed to freedom — it cannot help but project, choose, negate. Bad faith is not just dishonest; it is a betrayal of what you actually are. The condemnation is internal to what it means to be a for-itself, not imported from an external moral code. Whether this is convincing is a question worth exploring in your reflection.

How Sartre connects to the rest of the course

Knowledge and the self (Descartes). Descartes found certainty in the cogito: I think, therefore I am. The self was transparent to itself in the moment of reflection. Sartre inherits this starting point but transforms it utterly. His for-itself is also defined by self-awareness — but it is a self-awareness characterized by non-coincidence, lack, and nothingness rather than by clear and distinct perception. Sartre agrees with Descartes that consciousness is the place to start. He disagrees about what you find when you look there.

The is/ought problem (Hume). Hume argued that no description of how things are can by itself tell you how they ought to be. Sartre’s ethics faces this problem acutely: he derives an “ought” (be authentic, do not live in bad faith) from an “is” (you are a for-itself, you are free, you are always choosing). Whether he successfully avoids the is/ought gap, or whether he, like Marx, slips across it without noticing, is a live question.

History and freedom (Hegel and Marx). Sartre’s most important philosophical relationships in this course are with Hegel and Marx. From Hegel he takes the historical situatedness of consciousness and the idea that the self is not a given but an achievement. But he refuses Hegel’s teleology: history is not moving toward anything. It has no direction. From Marx he takes seriously the shaping power of social conditions. But he refuses Marxist determinism: conditions shape you, but they do not determine you. The final move is always yours.

Self-deception (a thread through all six units). Every philosopher in this course has grappled with the possibility that people deceive themselves. Socrates thought the Athenians knew more than they realized — but also that they did not know what they thought they knew. Descartes worried about systematic delusion. Hume showed that our confidence in causation is a product of habit, not reason. Marx argued that ideology produces false consciousness. Sartre’s bad faith is the culmination: self-deception understood not as an occasional error, not as a social product, but as a structural temptation built into the very nature of consciousness.

The final third of the lecture takes up the humanism question directly and summarizes the existentialist position. As you read:

The two versions of humanism. Sartre distinguishes the humanism he accepts from the one he rejects. Make sure you understand both. Which one does he think leads to fascism? Why?

The Descartes connection. Sartre says existentialism “agrees” with Descartes. In what specific way? And why does he then say Descartes is ultimately inadequate?

The freedom of others. Sartre argues that if you are serious about your own freedom, you must affirm the freedom of others. Does this argument work? What premises does it require? Does Sartre make those premises explicit?

The closing summary. Sartre closes by listing existentialism’s commitments: subjectivity, freedom, responsibility, honesty, and the affirmation of others’ freedom. Write your own one-sentence summary of each. These are your notes for the quiz and the final paper.