![handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi57 and id is 1 raw text is:
The Journal of Value Inquiry (2023) 57:1-20
https:Ildoi.org/l0.1007/si0790-021-09799-w
Can There Be an Existentialist Virtue Ethics?
Peter Antich'
Accepted: 22 January 2021 / Published online: 17 February 2021
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. part of Springer Nature 2021
It might seem that Existentialist ethics and virtue ethics have little to offer each other
philosophically. And there are a number of reasons why matters appear thus. For
example, Irene McMullin points out that contemporary virtue ethics often adopts a
naturalism with which Existentialism would find itself at odds.1 Or, as Steven Crow-
ell argues, it seems that someone who does the right thing from a fixed and stable
character might do so simply as part of a tendency to do what one does - but by
Existentialist lights, such a supposedly virtuous tendency would be inauthentic.2
Yet, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, we find Beauvoir claiming, One can choose
not to will himself free [on peut ne pas se vouloir libre]. In laziness [la paresse],
heedlessness [l'etourderie], capriciousness, cowardice, impatience, one contests
the meaning of the project at the very moment that one defines it.3 Here, Beau-
voir names a set of character traits that obstruct willing one's own freedom. In other
words, Beauvoir identifies a set of vices - and vices defined in specifically Existen-
tialist terms. What I would like to do in this paper is to attempt to follow this sugges-
tion by outlining an Existentialist virtue ethics. My purpose here is not so much to
provide an exegesis of Beauvoir, as to take up this suggestion of hers, to see whether
it works and how much we can do with it.4 Nor will I attempt to justify either virtue
See Irene McMullin, Existential Flourishing: A Phenomenology of the Virtues (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2019), Chapter 1.
2 See Steven Crowell, Existentialism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015).
3 See Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 1948), p.
25.
4 In this paper, I understand Existentialism in a broad sense, as a historical philosophical movement cen-
tered around a certain set of ideas about existence and freedom, and including such figures as Sartre,
Beauvoir, Camus, etc., and to some extent Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Certainly, there are formidable
disagreements within this movement, and not all the figures I have just listed would adopt the moniker
Existentialist. For this reason, I will not attempt to develop a doctrine that would be entirely acceptable
to all these thinkers. But neither will I attempt to explicate a single author in this tradition - I will not
attempt to claim, for example, that Beauvoir takes herself to be a virtue ethicist. Instead, and while the
impetus for this paper is drawn from Beauvoir, I will engage relatively freely with these different think-
ers in an attempt to describe what we might, broadly speaking, call an Existentialist virtue ethics (rather
than, say, a Beauvoirian or Sartrean virtue ethics).
E Peter Antich
peter.antich @trincoll.edu
Trinity College, 300 Summit Street, Hartford, CT 06106, USA
1 Springer](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jrnlvi57&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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