# Simone de Beauvoir French philosopher, novelist and essayist (1908-1986), author of *Le Deuxième Sexe* (*The Second Sex*, 1949) and *Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté* (*The Ethics of Ambiguity*, 1947). Raised a devout Catholic, she rejected the existence of God at fourteen, and the loss turned her toward philosophy. With Jean-Paul Sartre, her lifelong companion, she shaped French atheist existentialism, and she wrote its most developed ethics. Her importance for apologetics is that she took the hardest objection to atheist ethics head on. Dostoevsky's line that without God everything is permitted was, for her, the challenge existentialism had to meet. Her answer, that God's absence makes us more responsible rather than less, is the strongest form of the claim that ethics needs no God, and it deserves a careful reply. ## Biography - **1908**, born in Paris on 9 January into a bourgeois Catholic family - **Around 1922**, at fourteen, rejected the existence of God, a turning point that drew her to philosophy; her family's loss of social standing after 1919 also shaped her independence - **1926**, began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne; wrote her graduate thesis on Leibniz and took the agrégation in 1929, meeting Sartre while preparing for it - **1945**, helped found the journal *Les Temps Modernes* with Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty - **1943**, *L'Invitée* (*She Came to Stay*), her first novel - **1944**, *Pyrrhus et Cinéas*, an early essay on action and freedom - **1947**, *The Ethics of Ambiguity*, her systematic existentialist ethics - **1949**, *The Second Sex*, her analysis of how women have been made the Other - **1954**, *Les Mandarins* (*The Mandarins*), awarded the Prix Goncourt - **1970**, *La Vieillesse* (*The Coming of Age*), on old age - **1986**, died on 14 April; buried with Sartre in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris ## The core argument 1. **We are ambiguous beings.** Humans are free subjects who are also things in the world, consciousness that is also a body, individuals who depend on others. Beauvoir begins *The Ethics of Ambiguity* with this tension and says: "Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity." 2. **The desire to be God fails, and that is liberating.** Following Sartre, she grants that man tries "to make himself God" and fails. She draws an ethical conclusion: "One does not offer an ethics to a God." Ethics exists precisely because we are not God. The aim is not to be "right in the eyes of a God, but of being right in his own eyes." 3. **Freedom is the source of value.** "Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring." Values are not found in a heaven of essences; they arise where free beings commit themselves. 4. **To will freedom is to will morality.** "To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision." Authentic freedom must also will the freedom of others, which is the ground of her ethics of solidarity and of her later critique of oppression in *The Second Sex*. 5. **No God means more responsibility, not less.** She quotes Dostoevsky, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted," and answers: "far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements." Then: "A God can pardon, efface, and compensate. But if God does not exist, man's faults are inexpiable." ## A Christian response **She is right that atheism does not make anyone careless.** Many atheists live with great moral seriousness, and Beauvoir is a fair example. The [Moral Argument](/codex/moral-argument/) never claimed that atheists cannot be good. Its claim concerns grounding: what makes some acts really right or wrong, whatever anyone chooses. See [Atheist Moral Realism Defeater](/codex/atheist-moral-realism-defeater/). **Inexpiable is not the same as wrong.** Her reply shows that without God a fault cannot be undone. It does not show that anything is a fault. If freedom is the source of all value, then the torturer who freely commits himself to cruelty has also made a value. Beauvoir's demand that freedom must will the freedom of others is the crucial step, and it is asserted rather than derived. Why should my freedom be bound by yours? That is the gap the [Euthyphro Dilemma](/codex/euthyphro-dilemma/) discussions and [Atheism Moral Neutrality Failure](/codex/atheism-moral-neutrality-failure/) address. **Her ethics borrows Christian shape.** The claim that every person is a free subject who must never be reduced to an object, and that oppression is wrong because it denies a person's freedom, sounds very close to the biblical doctrine that every human being bears God's image: "And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" ([Genesis 1:27](/codex/genesis-1-27/), ASV). Both sexes share the image equally, which is the strongest ground available for the equality *The Second Sex* demands. See [Imago Dei](/codex/imago-dei/) and [Biblical Dignity](/codex/biblical-dignity/). **Freedom for what?** Scripture agrees that humans are called to freedom, and adds its direction: "For ye, brethren, were called for freedom; only use not your freedom for an occasion to the flesh, but through love be servants one to another" ([Galatians 5:13](/codex/galatians-5-13/), ASV). Beauvoir's freedom that wills the freedom of others reaches toward this, but without a Creator she cannot say why love is the right use of freedom rather than one option among many. **Pardon is the gospel's point.** Beauvoir saw clearly that a God could pardon and that without one, guilt is permanent. Christianity agrees and offers what she lacked: forgiveness that does not pretend the fault was nothing. See [Argument from Forgiveness](/codex/argument-from-forgiveness/). ## See also - [Atheism](/codex/atheism/), the domain hub; Beauvoir stands in its twentieth-century continental section - [Jean-Paul Sartre](/codex/jean-paul-sartre/), her companion and philosophical partner - [Albert Camus](/codex/albert-camus/), fellow member of the postwar Paris circle - [Maurice Merleau-Ponty](/codex/maurice-merleau-ponty/), fellow co-founder of *Les Temps Modernes* - [Moral Argument](/codex/moral-argument/), the argument her ethics most directly engages - [Atheism Moral Neutrality Failure](/codex/atheism-moral-neutrality-failure/), on whether atheism can ground moral claims - [Euthyphro Dilemma](/codex/euthyphro-dilemma/), the classic dispute over where moral authority lies - [Imago Dei](/codex/imago-dei/), the Christian ground for the equal dignity she defended - [Women in Ministry](/codex/women-in-ministry/), the codex's treatment of women in the church - [Libertarian Free Will](/codex/libertarian-free-will/), the freedom her ethics presupposes - [Argument from Forgiveness](/codex/argument-from-forgiveness/), on the pardon she said only a God could give ## Common questions this page answers **Q: Was Simone de Beauvoir an atheist?** Yes. Raised a devout Catholic, she rejected the existence of God at fourteen and remained an atheist for life. Her ethics and her feminism were both built on the premise that there is no God to define human nature or grant values. **Q: How did Beauvoir answer "if God does not exist, everything is permitted"?** She argued the reverse: because there is no God to pardon or compensate, every human act is a final commitment and every fault is permanent, so responsibility increases. Her critics reply that this shows faults cannot be undone without God, not that anything is a fault in the first place. **Q: What is The Ethics of Ambiguity about?** It is Beauvoir's 1947 attempt to give existentialism a real ethics. Humans are ambiguous, free yet bound to bodies and to others. Freedom is the source of all value, and to will one's own freedom authentically is to will the freedom of others too. **Q: How should Christians respond to The Second Sex?** By taking its demand for women's equal dignity seriously and asking what grounds it. Scripture teaches that male and female alike bear God's image, which gives that equality a footing her atheism cannot supply. Christians can also grant that the church has sometimes failed women, which the codex addresses directly.