Ethics, Freedom, and Choice

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity offers a useful framework for thinking about this. There, Beauvoir argues that ethics begins under conditions of moral uncertainty. Good faith is not purity of intention or guaranteed outcomes, but the willingness to act without denying responsibility. Ethics are lived, risky, and ongoing. Meaning continues to emerge rather than resolve.

While Beauvoir is among the twentieth-century thinkers most deeply concerned with intimate relational ethics, in her public-facing work, ambivalence tends to be situated as a social condition rather than an intrapsychic one.

Existentialist ethics was largely concerned with conflicting values, competing agendas, and double-binds where no choice is innocent or perfect. What The Ethics of Ambiguity does not fully theorize is the uncertainty that arises within the subject: loving and resenting the same person, wanting closeness and distance simultaneously, guilt without the possibility of repair. (These themes are present in some of Beauvoir’s novels, but without clear guidelines for ethical action under such conditions.)

Culture

Contemporary culture tends to struggle with ambivalence. In opt-in contexts with high emotional risk—dating, sex—this is often useful. Concepts like enthusiastic consent help clarify choice. Noting too much ambivalence too soon quickly resolves the dilemma.

Ongoing relationships, especially familial and platonic ones, tend to be less clear. If enthusiastic consent were the standard for everyday relational contact…

History, attachment, care, and boundaries complicate ethical responsibility.

What We Want and How We Feel

Collectively, we elevate clarity and consistency as ethical ideals, and for good reason. As recipients in relationship, most of us want to know where we stand. Legibility feels safe, respectful, fair. Yet as participants in relationship—as subjects rather than objects—we experience movement: shifts in feelings, capacities, and needs.

When clarity and consistency are moralized, they can imply stasis in a relational field that’s inherently dynamic.

Guilt

Many people experience ambivalence as troubling. They can feel pressure to choose a position and hold it, to feel one way, to resolve. Guilt becomes confused with instruction; one thinks, if I feel guilty, I must be doing something wrong. Sometimes this is the case. More frequently, guilt signals a sense of obligation without knowing what that obligation requires. It may reflect conflict without a clear ethical directive, or the recognition of a limit rather than a violation.

The Ethics of Ambiguity asks: how do I act ethically when outcomes are uncertain? Many people—clients included—ask: how do I act ethically when my own motives are mixed? Ambivalence can be understood as an intrapsychic form of ambiguity within relationship. Here, ethics involves the capacity to tolerate non-resolution. Good faith may not mean full transparency or emotional purity. It means staying engaged without denying complexity.

The Unconscious

Existential ethics often assumes a subject largely transparent to herself. However, in relationships, ethical failure doesn’t usually come from bad intentions so much as oversimplifying our own motives. Certainty can look ethical while functioning as avoidance. Ambivalence asks that we resist certain reflexes: collapsing into over-disclosure, fleeing into distance, or projecting unresolved inner conflict.