DE Weekly: Values, Moral Relativism, & Existential Ethics
Below is an archived email originally sent on July 13, 2026.
Values, Moral Relativism, & Existential Ethics
Last week, I introduced Emmanuel Levinas, the twentieth-century French philosopher who posited ethics as “first philosophy.” To him, this meant that the force fundamentally underpinning all of philosophy is our ethical responsibility.
Before anything else, Levinas argued, we are first of all called into existence to be unconditionally obligated to serve others. Our first act as a Self, then, should be to consider the Other.
This view is distinct from the prevailing ontology that dominates Existentialism, namely, the Sartrean/Heideggerian kind (as I also covered last week).
I got to thinking after rereading that newsletter: is there a way to define “existential ethics?” Is there such a thing as existential ethics?
The short answer is, yes, of course there is. The long answer is, there are competing ideas of what would constitute a body of existential ethics.
Let us take a look at three different philosophers with varying viewpoints: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
As you might well know, Sartre believed creating one’s essence begins (and largely stays) at the individual level.
For him, personal responsibility was of the utmost importance; we can help the freedom of the Other while focusing on ourselves. “In choosing for ourselves,” Sartre wrote, “we choose for all mankind.”
De Beauvoir expanded on Sartre’s ideas by expressing that true individual freedom cannot exist without the freedom of the Other. For her, engaging with society was necessary to be free precisely because our personal freedom extends beyond ourselves, and depends on others.
Nietzsche is an interesting one. Perhaps more so than the others, he emphasized the necessity for a “revaluation of values,” turning traditional morality as it had been understood on its head and advocating for the individual to “rise above” conformity and assert his own values and principles.
And so, we are given a fairly clear foundation on which to lay the groundwork of our existential ethics. It would look something like this:
Humans are utterly free and totally responsible for their existence, and must either find or create their own moral values to form their essence. To live an ethical life, then, one must take responsibility for one’s choices, taking always into consideration how they affect others.
Simple enough, no? Alas, as we have seen over the last century or so, ideas such as Nietzsche’s leave something to be desired, as they are prone to be perverted into something he did not intend.
This is due to the trap of moral relativism.
If every human being is brought into existence with no essence and the task of defining right and wrong for themselves, well, we would have utter chaos.
That kind of total subjectivism cannot work in practice; if eight billion people had eight billion different competing sets of morals and values, every man would be a tyrant and we would never act in the interests of the Other.
This is where the idea of Bad Faith and authenticity come in. In order to live authentically, we must recognize the gravity of our freedom, and use it to support the freedom of the Other.
Falling into bad faith, on the other hand, comes as a result of pretending that we have no choice in what we do, following whatever is convenient in the moment and hurting the Other.
De Beauvoir wrote that the human being “has no reason to will itself. But this does not mean that it cannot justify itself, that it cannot give itself reasons for being that it does not have.”
Further, it is human existence itself, she continues, “which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which it will be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged.”
What, then, is that body of values on which we can engage with the Other, with the world? What is the basis for existential ethics?
As it turns out, it is exactly what we read about earlier: freedom and responsibility. Not the abstract ideas of what it means to be free or responsible, no; we can take advantage of the total freedom we have and address the ethical obligation (à la Levinas) we have to help others realize their own freedom (so that I can realize mine).
My freedom, as it turns out, is not a factor of my givenness; it is bound up in the freedom of the Other.
This is the concept of Being-for-others expressed clearly in the form of ethics, in the ethical infinite we all owe to other human beings.
This is, ultimately, what constitutes existential ethics.
“We want freedom for freedom’s sake and in every particular circumstance. And in wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that freedom of others depends on ours . . . I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom.” –– Jean-Paul Sartre
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
This is a conversation and a topic that could go much deeper. There are a few philosophers I didn’t get to cover in this one who I could probably use to write a whole other newsletter about this. I might do that sometime.
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