Abstract

This dissertation examines the ethics of Simone de Beauvoir and argues that the pursuit of transcendence directs the primary obligations of Beauvoir's ethics: both the positive obligation to assume our freedom in active engagement with the world and the negative obligation to avoid undermining the freedom of others are underlain by the pursuit of transcendence. ;Beauvoir's concepts of transcendence and immanence are neither Sartrean nor metaphysical but represent types of human activities and designate a distinction between work and labor. Immanence designates the ultimately futile labor necessary to sustain life, as well as a mode of existence marked by passivity, ease, and submission to biological fate. Transcendence refers to creative or constructive work and, more generally, to an active mode of existence in which one attempts to surpass the present, burst out onto the future, and remain free from biological fate. ;Significantly, Beauvoir's normative distinction between creative work and futile labor furnishes a unique ethical framework for critiquing continuing gender inequities in marriage, parenting, and divisions of domestic labor. In an ethics in which human beings must pursue self-realization through transcendent activities, a value-laden distinction between labor and work also functions more generally to critique social arrangements that enlarge the freedom of some by miring others in forms of maintenance labor. Large-scale inequitable divisions of meaningful work and maintenance labor effectively deprive those who labor to maintain life of opportunities for creative work and rest on an ethical wrong for this reason. ;In contrast to Karl Marx, Beauvoir directs a critique of careers of maintenance labor not at labor specializations in the public realm but at the choice to live as a housewife: the woman who abdicates the more arduous pursuit of transcendence for life as a wife makes a decisive moral error. Although Beauvoir herself directs her critique of marriage to forms of marriage in which women are wives by occupation, her critique can be extended to provide a solution to the modern problem of the second shift. The ethical solution to gender inequities in divisions of household labor is that individuals share chores and clean up after themselves