Jonathan Gingerich

In her 1947 book _Toward an Ethics of Ambiguity_, Simone de Beauvoir sketches the outlines of a systematic existentialist ethical theory. This short and startlingly ambitious text purports to offer nothing less than a new way to meet the challenge of moral skepticism with a theory that at once grounds moral normativity and entails certain first-order moral norms. We argue that Beauvoir offers a distinctive and promising version of metaethical constructivism that deserves to be treated as a live option in contemporary debates. Beauvoirian constructivism has much in common with Kantian constructivist approaches to metaethics. It departs from them in that the Beauvoirian existential imperative to will freedom is derived not from rational agency as such but from contingent features of our embodied subjectivity.

Spontaneous freedom, the freedom of unplanned and unscripted activity enjoyed by “free spirits,” is central to everyday talk about “freedom.” Yet the freedom of spontaneity is absent from contemporary moral philosophers’ theories of freedom. This article begins to remedy the philosophical neglect of spontaneous freedom. I offer an account of the nature of spontaneous freedom and make a case for its value. I go on to show how an understanding of spontaneous freedom clarifies the free will debate by helping to make sense of the libertarian claim that compatibilist varieties of freedom do not allow for genuine novelty and creativity.