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Edward asked:
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If god is dead, then everything is permitted. What is Sartre's response to this?
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============
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For Sartre, if God is dead, it doesn't follow that everything is permitted, although it follows, for Sartre,
that there are no objective moral commands or values. In Emotion and Human Existence,where he
quotes Dostoevsky, Sartre claims that man chooses values, creates and imposes them as an ideal
goal transcending the material world as a result of the forlornness of his existence. Man, in his
freedom defines himself, and in his desire for a God who doesn't exist, he defines himself as a being
whose reality includes values. In Being and Nothingness,man is described in abstract as, at first a
desiring consciousness suffering lack or privation which gives rise to an upsurge towards being and
beyond being to value. In emerging into human reality we create value. If we create values as part of
human reality, it cannot be that anything is permissible.
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In our freedom to choose, it would seem that we can choose any action. However, in Emotion and
Human Existence,it is claimed that we are not just responsible for ourselves but for all men, and also
that we can never choose evil and although this claim doesn't seem to be directly substantiated in this
text, Sartre can hold that to choose evil as a goal is to limit possibilities for action and so would be to
live in bad faith. For any particular evil act, it is suggested in Being and Nothingnessthat we cannot
choose to do something we regard as evil as this is to be both for and against it.
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There is also the moral prohibition which arises by virtue of the fact that we exist as one amongst
others, in human reality, and is exampled in Being and Nothingness as the moral awareness of the
"look" of the other which can bring us to shame. We are conscious of the moral judgements. Also, we
are conscious of the consciousness of others, which is another reason that we also cannot do what
we like. We don't just perceive that which is at a spatial distance, but have awareness of the other
without this distance, and as such morality is transcendent, but close, and we cannot ignore suffering
of others.
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Rachel Browne
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88
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