Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity and W. D. Ross’s Ethical Pluralism: An Attempt at Integration
April 25, 2025
Work-in-Progress Seminar
Start time: 12:00 p.m.
End time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: Hybrid (In-person and Zoom)
Description
In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir argues that the active promotion of the open futures of all human beings should be the preeminent normative principle that we follow for deciding what we should do. She criticizes overly individualistic conceptions or exercises of human freedom that are indifferent to the freedom of others, including ones that are supposedly existentialist. There are striking convergences between Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity and W. D. Ross’s emphasis on the ambiguity, complexity, and non-absoluteness of ethical deliberation and conduct. In particular, it is notable that they both argue that such ambiguity, complexity, and non-absoluteness does not preclude the conception and bindingness of a guiding ethical principle, or at least that of a guiding ethical sensibility. For Beauvoir, this is the principle of promoting human beings’ open futures; for Ross, this is the fulfillment of what he calls “prima facie duties” (less misleadingly, normally binding but occasionally defeasible ethical obligations). In this Work-in-Progress seminar, Dr. Koo will examine whether normative force can, indeed, be generated and binding on the basis of these ideas. If so, that would go some way towards showing the possibility and applicability of an existentialist ethics to human life and conduct.
About the Speaker
Jo-Jo Koo joined the Department of Focused Inquiry at VCU starting in the fall of 2022. His disciplinary background and teaching experience is in philosophy, in which he earned his doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh and his bachelor of arts at Wesleyan University. In between his undergraduate and graduate studies, he received a two-year scholarship award from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and studied philosophy in Tübingen, Germany. He has teaching and research interests (among other areas) in critical thinking, normative and applied ethics, philosophy of race and gender, critical social philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, philosophical hermeneutics, Chinese philosophy, and the debate of determinism versus free will. You can learn comprehensive and detailed information about his academic profile at his homepage (https://sites.google.com/view/jo-jokoo).