Description

Scholarship on Simone de Beauvoir is often feminist, political, or phenomenological in nature. This is to be expected. But from my perspective, this literature does not reflect just how significant of a moral theorist (broadly construed) Beauvoir was. Granted, I take the Beauvoirian feminist and political philosophy to be subsets of moral philosophy. And granted, there has been excellent Beauvoirian scholarship covering topics in applied ethics such as punishment, racism, sexism, gender identity, political movements, and platonic and romantic relationships, among others. As great as all this literature is, there is so much more we can do with Beauvoir. Authors who work in utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and virtue ethics alike have written original works that go beyond what John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, or Aristotle ever considered. My dissertation sets out to do the same with Beauvoir's existentialist ethics