John asked:

Is Sartre's existentialist ethics possible? ethics without moral principles to follow? What are some
arguments that confirm that existential ethics is possible? and those that deny it?

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There is a superb critique of Sartre's existentialist ethics in Iris Murdoch's short book The Sovereignty
of Good.Murdoch argues convincingly that the values, the 'good' we perceive in the world around us,
or in the consequences of the possible choices we might make, cannot appear to us as merely the
products of our own subjective will. — I think that this is true on the level of phenomenology, as a
description of the 'way things must appear' to the agent making moral choices.

When understood in this way, however, as a piece of phenomenology rather than as a metaphysical
claim about the values that exist in a non-physical world of Platonic forms, I would argue that
Murdoch's claim is not inconsistent with an existentialist approach to ethics.

The strongest argument in favour of an existentialist ethics is simply the impossibility of constructing a
moral theory. There is no system of moral principles or rules that can be applied to every possible
case. There will always be exceptions. From an existentialist point of view, one might say that there
will always be the potential, in any new situation that you face, to discover a reason for going against
the pattern of responses that you have made to similar situations in the past. Light dawns. You
undergo a radical conversion. You can try formulating a new moral 'rule of thumb' that takes account
of your new way of seeing things, but you can never be certain you will not be forced to change your
mind again.

What is important in the account I have just given is that one talks of a 'situation', of a 'reason' that
one discovers. These features are most appropriately described in terms of the metaphor of vision. I
seein the situation facing me what is the right thing to be done. The fact that it is me,as I am now,
doing the seeing, the fact that other people — or indeed my former self — might judge things
differently does not need to be mentioned, because it is implicitly understood.

Geoffrey Klempner