Kierkegaard and Beauvoir: Existential Ethics as a Humanism

Abstract Simone de Beauvoir’s moral philosophy has received relatively little attention in the scholarly world. This article seeks to bring her Ethics of Ambiguity into dialogue with Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, two works written a century apart, but which both strive to offer a response to challenges concerning the dangers of existential philosophy’s focus on subjectivity. Despite some fundamental differences in orientation, especially with regard to questions of action and social change, Beauvoir and Kierkegaard’s works offer complementary models for understanding how existential ethics can move beyond subjectivist stances and allow for attentiveness to the plurality of concrete, singular others.