PHIL103: Moral and Political Philosophy

This conception of happiness, however, raises our third question: How ought we act towards other people? If the source of our value and nature is wholly internal, what obligations can I have to other humans? Can I freely and authentically choose to kill my mother, as Orestes does? Can I choose to be a murderer, a thief, or an exploiter of humanity? Is it true, as some Existentialist were fond of pointing out, that if God is dead then all things are allowable? I'm sure that you will want to discuss this issue, as it arises in The Flies, in your seminars, but I would like to briefly present you with what I take to be Sartre's three-fold response to this question in Existentialism and Human Emotions.

 (1) First, in choosing our own human nature, according to Sartre, we choose human nature for all humans.  Hence, we must choose courses of action that we would wish all humans to take. In choosing for ourselves, we choose for all men.  This must be the case because, in order to act freely, I cannot allow myself to be affected by my peculiar circumstances, desires, or goals. This would be to act in bad faith, to try to identify myself with my desires, or my plans, or my circumstances, and these are all merely pictures on my mental TV screen.  When I act freely, the only things that can affect my action must be things that I share with all free agents.  Thus, I must choose in the same way I would want others to choose.  To say that one must act authentically is to say that one must act in a way that ignores the differences between oneself and other people.  After all, these differences are merely external and do not affect our identity as free agents, within our islands of subjectivity.  To be free, then, I must follow the golden rule and act only as I would have others act.

(2) Sartre also argues that in order to be free, we must desire the freedom of all men.  It is self-defeating to attempt to use other humans as objects to satisfy our desires, or to protect our freedom at the cost of enslaving others.  If I attempt to enslave others or use them as objects, I make myself a slave and an object.  The person who attempts to dominate other people finds himself a slave to his dependence on the attention and approval of the people he tries to enslave.  Think of the tough guy leader of a clique of teenagers.  He defines himself in terms of the expectations of his peers to keep their approval and admiration.  He makes himself into a character controlled by the very slaves of whom he takes himself to be the master.  The person who uses other people as objects to satisfy his desires makes himself an object.  He can see other people only through his desires, and ultimately sees himself only as his desire.  The manipulator, who attempts to buy and sell other people for his own ends, finds that he has sold his own soul as well by seeing himself merely as his desires.  To see others as slaves of our desire is to make ourselves a slave of desire.  To be free, we must desire the freedom of all men.

(3) Third, the free decisions that we make are not merely arbitrary.  As we saw earlier, freedom does not mean just being    able to do anything.  The artist is free to create; she does not follow any explicit rules.  Yet her action is constrained by the requirement that her creation must be coherent.  In order to be her creation, she must pull the various disparate elements that go into the painting into one unified whole.  Her freedom is a freedom of synthesis constrained by the material she has to work with and the requirement that she make some one unified thing out of it.  In the same way, our actions must unify the many different influences on our lives into the one life that is to be ours.  In pulling ourselves together, we cannot ignore the relationships and obligations that provide the raw materials of our lives.  We must weave them into our lives, although how we will do this is up to us.  Our actions, though free, are constrained by our situation in a community.  Orestes, as you shall see in The Flies, is not free to ignore his family, his country, and his mother's crime.  Why does he not just leave, as Zeus suggests?

The ethics of absolute freedom, it would seem, are not absolutely free.  To be free we must take on the responsibility of choosing for all men, we must desire and work for the freedom of all men, and we must create ourselves within the context of the relationships and obligations we have to other people.

Is the ethic of absolute freedom a portrait of human greatness? Human excellence often defines itself in the struggle against the forces that oppose human flourishing.  Existentialism attempts to find happiness, value, and meaning in a modern world characterized by isolation, inauthenticity, and absurdity.  It attempts to see what human excellence can consist of if we find ourselves to be islands of subjectivity in an otherwise objective world.  You will certainly want to ask if this is in fact what we find ourselves to be, but can it be doubted that the Existentialist attempt to find meaning in  the face of absurdity exemplifies the basic drive that all portraits of human excellence must embody.