Although existentialism does not offer a full and systematic account of ethical value, there are several common threads that recur in the works of the main existentialist philosophers which suggest what that account might, in theory, look like. Certain concepts, like engagement and authenticity, have emerged in their own right as significant ethical terms; some thinkers, including Nietzsche and Sartre, have explicitly addressed morality, albeit from unusual perspectives; and the subjectivist bias of existentialism allows us to draw some broad conclusions of our own.
Since the individual is the primary concern of existentialists, personal morality and ethics supersede social morality and popular ethics. For this reason, some thinkers have chosen to present moral questions in literary rather than philosophical works, using the novel or theatre to explore the psychology of individual ethical decisions. Notable examples include Kierkegaard’s monumental Either/Or; Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky; Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy; and the novels and plays of Albert Camus. This approach dovetails neatly with the phenomenological method, and is in stark contrast to more traditional ethical treatises like those of Kant or Spinoza.
When Nietzsche announced in 1882 that God is dead he was laying down a challenge. Without any external source of value and meaning – particularly moral value – then we are free to create value and meaning ourselves. The challenge is to embrace this freedom and create meaningful, aspirational values for which we are wholly responsible, rather than lapse into nihilism and the apathy of mass consensus.
For Nietzsche, morality is not rooted in any external or objective system of values. Moral codes are merely reflections of existing social structures that serve to deaden the impulses of the individual and maintain the interests of the powerful classes.
Morality is herd-instinct in the individual. The Gay Science ยง116
Once these structures become internalised – what we might call, in Freud’s term, the Super-ego – the herd-instinct is reinforced and individuals suppress or deny their own passions and desires through fear of isolation from the community: any impulse to behave differently creates guilt or a sense of sin. To be moral, in this sense, is to deny one’s individuality.
Forty years earlier Kierkegaard had come to a similar conclusion via a different route. We cannot make moral choices, he argued, without an appeal to an existing set of standards (the aim to maximise happiness, to seek our own advantage, to please God, and so on). But those prior criteria could not have been chosen without an even earlier set of standards to appeal to – and we could not have chosen those standards without prior standards – and so on ad infinitum. This regress can only be halted by an individual choice, a leap of faith for which we alone are responsible.
For Kierkegaard, subjectivity is truth: truth emerges from being rather than knowing, from the commitment to one’s choices and the measure of passion with which a belief is adopted or appropriated. In other words, an existentialist does not measure ethical choices by what you do (like a utilitarian) or even by who you are (like a virtue ethicist), but by how you choose, by the pathos of the choice itself. To throw oneself fully into a decision and to commit one’s very being to that choice and all that follows from it – that, for the existentialists, is the essence of moral decision-making.
This absence of absolute moral standards (the death of God) and the focus upon the individual’s commitment, are both captured in Sartre’s famous dilemma described in Existentialism is a Humanism:
... a pupil of mine... at this moment, had the choice between going to England to join the Free French Forces or of staying near his mother and helping her to live... I had but one reply to make. You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world.
In the end, you must invent your own values and commit yourself to the life that follows from them.
This insistence upon personal commitment gives rise to the most strongly evaluative term in the existentialist’s vocabulary: authenticity. The choices an individual makes will inevitably clash sometimes with the world outside: the expectations of others, social conformity, a desire to please, unjust laws, self-doubt – all put pressure upon the individual to betray their values. An authentic response is to stay true to yourself: not just out of stubbornness, but as a measure of your commitment to your choices. Acting inauthentically, or in bad faith as Sartre liked to put it, is therefore a moral failing and comes in many guises, although it usually involves blaming somebody or something else for what happens, or pretending to be something that you are not. Maintaining commitment to your choices, on the other hand, is morally praiseworthy and the sign of an authentic individual who is taking responsibility for their freedom.
The notion of authenticity gives rise to a common distinction in existentialist thinking between the individual and the herd, or the masses. For Kierkegaard, ‘the crowd is untruth’ and standing apart and alone is a necessary condition of authenticity. For many people the normative just is the normal: ideas are inherited and repeated without thought or personal commitment and the values they hold seem far from their own choosing. It takes courage to challenge these unquestioned assumptions: to oppose the herd, in Nietzsche’s terms, one must overcome oneself. Whereas the mass of people act in bad faith and do not acknowledge their freedom, the authentic individual shows their commitment through their concrete actions.
It is through concrete action, as an expression of authentic commitment, that a human life achieves meaning for existentialists. Life is about doing, not thinking: in this sense, the existentialists are opposed to certain types of rationalism and locate value and meaning not in logical or conceptual relations, but in authentic action, in following through on one’s choices and making a practical difference to the world. Action is a measure of authenticity: not surprising, perhaps, as it is the only visible sign of an otherwise internal and invisible affect. The authentic individual may not, at first glance, appear any different from the masses around them: but a close inspection of their actions will reveal a pattern of commitment and responsibility that marks them out. Sartre called this pattern engagement: an engaged individual acts in the world and makes a difference to the world, a notion that accounts for the close historical connection between existentialism and revolutionary politics.
In Existentialism is a Humanism Sartre tried to defend his philosophy against the accusation of radical subjectivism:
... as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
Once the sphere of human action is located within a community of equally free, equally responsible individuals, then a person’s actions take on a universalised quality. We act for all humanity when we bring values into being. This notion of universalising one’s values sounds very like Kant; but unlike Kant’s categorical imperative, it does not derive from reason but from the very conditions of existing in the world.
These conditions are centred upon freedom and responsibility, two notions that are central to existentialist thinking and are in fact closely bound up with any ethical system. Existentialists do not ask if we are free and therefore responsible for ourselves – the very experience of our freedom is a guarantee of that. Instead, responsibility for living becomes another feature of the authentic, ethically praiseworthy life and the price of engagement with the world.
There are many difficulties with this account of existentialist ethics as the picture is unfortunately incomplete (it is worth noting that Sartre’s aim of publishing a complete description of ethical value was not realised at the time of his death). Nevertheless, the elements of an ethical system are in place: an emphasis upon individual commitment; the evaluative concept of authenticity; a theory of responsibility; and an attempt to universalise moral values. Whether these elements constitute a full and satisfactory account of ethical behaviour is unclear.