Sartre, Freedom and Responsibility

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Sartre, Freedom and Responsibility

• Thesis each of us chooses the entire world,
  everything we are and do is the result of our
  choice, and thus we are each responsible for
  everything in the world.

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Some existentialist terms

• for-itself persons beings who act according to
  choices that make them who they are
  existentially free beings, those who choose their
  existence and thus determine their essence.
• Bad faith fleeing decisions rather than making
  and acting on them in full consciousness that one
  is choosing the course of ones life inauthentic
• facticity a fact over which we have no control
  e.g., that we were born.

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Sartres Argument

• We humans make the world by making things,
  events, situations meaningful through our
  projects.
• But how does this make everything mine, how is it
  that everything which happens to me is
  mine(780b)?

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• Whatever my community does I could get out of
  or withhold my endorsement from by either
  deserting the community or by committing suicide.
  By remaining I endorse what is happening.

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Objection to Sartre

• Had I lived in a time when I did not have to make
  this terrible choice (e.g., join the Resistance
  and sacrifice my family, or acquiesce with the
  Nazi regime), I would not have acted as I did.
• Sartres response I am not separable from the
  epoch in which I find myself.

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• each person is an absolute upsurge at an
  absolute date and is perfectly unthinkable at
  another date. It is therefore a waste of time to
  ask what I should have been if this war had not
  broken out, for I have chosen myself as one of
  the possible meaning of the epoch with
  imperceptibly led to war.... I am not distinct
  from this same epoch. (781b)

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Sartres concept of freedom

• Our freedom consists in the fact that we must
  choose what it means to exist and how we will
  continue to exist at every moment.
• 1. Every situation is an opportunity that is
  either made use of or neglected.
• 2. Hence, every situation forces us to choose
  what we will make of it.

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• 3. In this sense we are free, but our freedom
  comes ultimately from the fact of our being as a
  for-itself, a being who is thrown into this
  situation of being forced to choose at every
  moment.
• 4. Hence, although we are free, we are also
  anguished -- we are always having to make
  difficult choices and never allowed to shift
  responsibility onto others.

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Critical Interpretation

• Sartres sense of freedom is, in effect,
  definitional.
• It does not entail that there are no forces on us
  which causally determine our choices. Thus,
  Sartre does not defeat determinism.