In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

overnments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,

, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth,

On top of that, the potential normalization of those viewings can be considered a harm to all children

The Thorn report claims that within a year it will become significantly easier for AI to generate images that are essentially indistinguishable from real images

pedophilia is biological in nature, and that keeping pedophilic urges at bay can be incredibly difficult

that AI-generated child sexual material could actually benefit society in the long run by providing a less harmful alternative to the already-massive market for images of child sexual abuse

incorporating AI-generated images into existing forms of therapy could be one way of diminishing risk.

Plus, redirecting potential viewers of child pornography to AI-generated images could help victims by preventing their images from being continually viewed, either by pedophiles

Outpacing E. coli: Development of Vibrio natriegens as a Next-Generation Cloning Host

HTTP semantics for interaction with IPFS

updates.

PostgreSQL's performance can drop by orders of magnitude (up to 1,000x in some benchmarks) compared to MongoDB because it cannot perform "in-place" updates.

echnically, GIN indexes do not support Index-Only Scans

While you can index JSONB fields, these indexes (like GIN, or Generalized Inverted Index) grow significantly faster than standard relational indexes.

MongoDB's BSON, which allows the engine to skip directly to specific fields.

To read or filter even a tiny piece of data, the database must fetch and decompress the entire document from disk into memory.

JSONB.

When you update a single nested field, the database must rewrite the entire JSON object as a new row version (via MVCC, or Multi-Version Concurrency Control).

Design the experiment. First, you have to build out the details of the experiment and figure out how everything will fit and mesh together. For this, you must have a solid and reliable method of collecting data, meaning the data gathered must be reliable and actionable.

Lua is more dynamic than Wren which makes its job harder. Lua also tries very hard to be compatible across a wide range of hardware and compilers. If you have a C89 compiler for it, odds are very good that you can run Lua on it. Wren cares about compatibility, but it requires C99 or C++98 and IEEE double precision floats. That may exclude some edge case hardware, but makes things like NaN tagging, computed gotos, and some other tricks possible.

In 1731, Manuel Trujillo accused two Pueblo men, Acensio Povia and Antonio Yuba, of committing sodomy. Both Povia and Yuba denied this accusation, and Yuba invoked his status as a Christian in order to bolster his credibility. Governor Gervasio Cruzat y Góngora chose to exile Povia and Yuba to different pueblos for a period of four months, during which time they were to cease any and all communication with one another. This case explores sexual practices deemed “nefarious sins” as well as illustrates what scholars have called the colonial dilemma—the situation where Indigenous peoples remained in a subjected state despite theological equality following their Christian conversion

C4D glass material rendering reveals hidden artwork through transparent ramps (e.g., cat throwing dart under fishbowl ramp) -- VPX cannot render real-time refractions

“So what?”

Outside of the historically black tradition, an additional 15% of African-Americans are members of evangelical denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention or Assemblies of God, and 4% are members of mainline denominations, such as the Disciples of Christ. Overall, the membership of historically black Protestant denominations is 92% black, while African-Americans make up relatively small portions of the membership of evangelical (6%) and mainline (2%) churches.

One might argue that the best way to protect workers and the domestic economy is to stop trade with other nations. Then the whole circular flow of inputs and outputs would stay within our borders. But if we decided to do that, how would we get resources like cobalt and coffee beans? The United States simply can’t produce some things, and it can’t manufacture some products, such as steel and most clothing, at the low costs we’re used to. The fact is that nations—like people—are good at producing different things: you may be better at balancing a ledger than repairing a car. In that case you benefit by “exporting” your bookkeeping services and “importing” the car repairs you need from a good mechanic. Economists refer to specialization like this as advantage.

The difference between the value of a country’s exports and the value of its imports during a specific time is the country’s balance of trade.

Exports are goods and services made in one country and sold to others. Imports are goods and services that are bought from other countries. The United States is the largest importer and second largest exporter in the world.

Doomscrolling

feeling calmer but isolated, re-downloading them, feeling worse but connected again

But James Nevin, the Sipekne’katik fisherman, still went out for elvers. “It’s fast money,” he said. On a philosophical level, he agreed with the elders: “You come in, you fuckin’ reap the benefits, and then, once it’s gone, that’s it. You feel pretty shitty.” But, with the money he made, he was able to buy a new boat for the lobster season.

By some metrics, the Sipekne’katik’s radicalism had been a political success. The band’s loudest critics—the white fishermen—had their reputation badly damaged by the incidents of arson and violence, and, amid international outrage, the D.F.O. had reached new agreements with other First Nations about their treaty fisheries. Yet the Sipekne’katik refused to negotiate with the D.F.O., or to allow outside oversight of its treaty fishery, arguing that doing so would compromise their sovereignty.

Many inshore lobster captains had been alive in the nineties, when, after corporations took control of the cod industry, it collapsed from overfishing, resulting in the largest instance of layoffs in the history of the country.

In his early years at the head of Membertou, the nation’s financial situation was dismal; today, its total annual revenue, which includes fishing, gaming, and real-estate projects, is over sixty-two million dollars. The success has been communal: some of the profits go to investment in future economic development, and the rest goes to social programming, housing, education, and dividends received by individual nation members.

“No one is going to be talking about taking things away from the First Nations, and that is very good for the company.”

Pubnico. T

Impatient, the Sipekne’katik Chief and Council, its governing body, decided to take a radical new approach: inaugurating an unsanctioned, self-regulated treaty fishery in defiance of the Canadian government. To the outrage of the inshore fishermen, the Sipekne’katik had launched their treaty fishery months before the opening of the official inshore season, giving them early access to the lobster.

pass down licenses to their children, and populate quaint villages in an area that has become known as the French Shore

This should be organized by theme, point, similarity, or aspect of the topic.  Your organization will be determined by the assignment or by the patterns you see in the material you are synthesizing.  The organization is the most important part of a synthesis, so try out more than one format.

The four “spanned all the different areas of expertise

If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless.

The in-text citation is offset with parentheses, clearly calling attention to itself for the reader. The reference to the author or title is like a signal to the reader that information was incorporated from a separate source.

Tus artículos y mensajes de estado pueden transmitirse a todos los servicios, no solamente uno,

The A note is 440 Hz,

Information science

Disciplines and related fields

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n this study, both MPF and UPF diets following national healthy dietary guidance resulted in percentage weight loss after 8 weeks, with significantly greater reductions on the MPF diet. Greater weight, BMI and fat mass loss were also observed on the MPF compared with the UPF diet, as well as greater reductions in triglycerides and cravings. Conversely, LDL-C was lower on the UPF diet. Overall, these results suggest favorable changes in body composition and craving control from adhering to national dietary guidance with a diet of MPF rather than UPF.

national healthy dietary guidance

Weight and BMI were significantly lower at 8 weeks from baseline on both diets. Waist circumference and waist-to-height ratio did not differ significantly. Reductions in weight (−0.96 kg (s.e., 0.40); P = 0.019) and BMI (−0.34 kg m−2 (s.e., 0.14); P = 0.021) were significantly greater on the MPF versus UPF diet, with no significant differences in waist circumference.

using bioelectrical impedance analysis

a 4-week washout period

randomised controlled trial include the long 8-week duration of each intervention diet, and provision of all food and drink to participants’ homes to provide

UK dietary energy source

The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.

that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.

The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagatio

, till they shall have acquired strength; and to send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants; to induce whom to migrate hither, proper encouragements were to be proposed.

the bill should be taken up, and further directing, that they should continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expence, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniusses,

Instances are known, under these circumstances, of their rearing a dozen children.

The women are submitted to unjust drudgery. This I believe is the case with every barbarous people.

surrender, though it be to the whites, who he knows will treat him well: t

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A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.

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It can similarly be argued that there is no real distinction between imposing harms and withholding benefits. The only difference between the two cases concerns what we understand to be the status quo, which lacks moral significance

Chappell, R.Y. and Meissner, D. (2023). Arguments for Utilitarianism. In R.Y. Chappell, D. Meissner, and W. MacAskill (eds.), An Introduction to Utilitarianism, <https://www.utilitarianism.net/arguments-for-utilitarianism>, accessed document.write((new Date).toLocaleDateString("en-US"))2/13/2026.

Arguments for Utilitarianismfunction togglePlayOrPause(){document.getElementById("player-container").classList.add("show-player"),document.getElementById("audio-icon").outerHTML=""}Table of ContentsIntroduction: Moral Methodology & Reflective EquilibriumArguments for UtilitarianismWhat Fundamentally MattersThe Veil of IgnoranceEx Ante ParetoExpanding the Moral CircleThe Poverty of the AlternativesThe Paradox of DeontologyThe Hope ObjectionSkepticism About the Distinction Between Doing and AllowingStatus Quo BiasEvolutionary Debunking ArgumentsConclusionResources and Further ReadingIntroduction: Moral Methodology & Reflective EquilibriumYou cannot prove a moral theory. Whatever arguments you come up with, it’s always possible for someone else to reject your premises—if they are willing to accept the costs of doing so. Different theories offer different advantages. This chapter will set out some of the major considerations that plausibly count in favor of utilitarianism. A complete view also needs to consider the costs of utilitarianism (or the advantages of its competitors), which are addressed in Chapter 8: Objections to Utilitarianism. You can then reach an all-things-considered judgment as to which moral theory strikes you as overall best or most plausible.To this end, moral philosophers typically use the methodology of reflective equilibrium. 1 1 This involves balancing two broad kinds of evidence as applied to moral theories:Intuitions about specific cases (thought experiments).General theoretical considerations, including the plausibility of the theory’s principles or systematic claims about what matters.General principles can be challenged by coming up with putative counterexamples, or cases in which they give an intuitively incorrect verdict. In response to such putative counterexamples, we must weigh the force of the case-based intuition against the inherent plausibility of the principle being challenged. This could lead you to either revise the principle to accommodate your intuitions about cases or to reconsider your verdict about the specific case, if you judge the general principle to be better supported (especially if you are able to “explain away” the opposing intuition as resting on some implicit mistake or confusion).As we will see, the arguments in favor of utilitarianism rest overwhelmingly on general theoretical considerations. Challenges to the view can take either form, but many of the most pressing objections involve thought experiments in which utilitarianism is held to yield counterintuitive verdicts.There is no neutral, non-question-begging answer to how one ought to resolve such conflicts. 2 2 It takes judgment, and different people may be disposed to react in different ways depending on their philosophical temperament. As a general rule, those of a temperament that favors systematic theorizing are more likely to be drawn to utilitarianism (and related views), whereas those who hew close to common sense intuitions are less likely to be swayed by its theoretical virtues. Considering the arguments below may thus do more than just illuminate utilitarianism; it may also help you to discern your own philosophical temperament!While our presentation focuses on utilitarianism, it’s worth noting that many of the arguments below could also be taken to support other forms of welfarist consequentialism (just as many of the objections to utilitarianism also apply to these related views). This chapter explores arguments for utilitarianism and closely related views over non-consequentialist approaches to ethics.Arguments for UtilitarianismWhat Fundamentally MattersMoral theories serve to specify what fundamentally matters, and utilitarianism offers a particularly compelling answer to this question.Almost anyone would agree with utilitarianism that suffering is bad, and well-being is good. What could be more obvious? If anything matters morally, human well-being surely does. And it would be arbitrary to limit moral concern to our own species, so we should instead conclude that well-being generally is what matters. That is, we ought to want the lives of sentient beings to go as well as possible (whether that ultimately comes down to maximizing happiness, desire satisfaction, or other welfare goods).Could anything else be more important? Such a suggestion can seem puzzling. Consider: it is (usually) wrong to steal. 3 3 But that is plausibly because stealing tends to be harmful, reducing people’s well-being. 4 4 By contrast, most people are open to redistributive taxation, if it allows governments to provide benefits that reliably raise the overall level of well-being in society. So it’s not that individuals just have a natural right to not be interfered with no matter what. When judging institutional arrangements (such as property and tax law), we recognize that what matters is coming up with arrangements that tend to secure overall good results, and that the most important factor in what makes a result good is that it promotes well-being. 5 5Such reasoning may justify viewing utilitarianism as the default starting point for moral theorizing. 6 6 If someone wants to claim that there is some other moral consideration that can override overall well-being (trumping the importance of saving lives, reducing suffering, and promoting flourishing), they face the challenge of explaining how that could possibly be so. Many common moral rules (like those that prohibit theft, lying, or breaking promises), while not explicitly utilitarian in content, nonetheless have a clear utilitarian rationale. If they did not generally promote well-being—but instead actively harmed people—it’s hard to see what reason we would have to still want people to follow them. To follow and enforce harmful moral rules (such as rules prohibiting same-sex relationships) would seem like a kind of “rule worship”, and not truly ethical at all. 7 7 Since the only moral rules that seem plausible are those that tend to promote well-being, that’s some reason to think that moral rules are, as utilitarianism suggests, purely instrumental to promoting well-being.Similar judgments apply to hypothetical cases in which you somehow know for sure that a typically reliable rule is, in this particular instance, counterproductive. In the extreme case, we all recognize that you ought to lie or break a promise if lives are on the line. In practice, of course, the best way to achieve good results over the long run is to respect commonsense moral rules and virtues while seeking opportunities to help others. (It’s important not to mistake the hypothetical verdicts utilitarianism offers in stylized thought experiments with the practical guidance it offers in real life.) The key point is just that utilitarianism offers a seemingly unbeatable answer to the question of what fundamentally matters: protecting and promoting the interests of all sentient beings to make the world as good as it can be.The Veil of IgnoranceHumans are masters of self-deception and motivated reasoning. If something benefits us personally, it’s all too easy to convince ourselves that it must be okay. We are also more easily swayed by the interests of more salient or sympathetic individuals (favoring puppies over pigs, for example). To correct for such biases, it can be helpful to force impartiality by imagining that you are looking down on the world from behind a “veil of ignorance”. This veil reveals the facts about each individual’s circumstances in society—their income, happiness level, preferences, etc.—and the effects that each choice would have on each person, while hiding from you the knowledge of which of these individuals you are. 8 8 To more fairly determine what ideally ought to be done, we may ask what everyone would have most personal reason to prefer from behind this veil of ignorance. If you’re equally likely to end up being anyone in the world, it would seem prudent to maximize overall well-being, just as utilitarianism prescribes. 9 9How much weight we should give to the verdicts that would be chosen, on self-interested grounds, from behind the veil? The veil thought experiment highlights how utilitarianism gives equal weight to everyone’s interests, without bias. That is, utilitarianism is just what we get when we are beneficent to all: extending to everyone the kind of careful concern that prudent people have for their own interests. 10 10 But it may seem question-begging to those who reject welfarism, and so deny that interests are all that matter. For example, the veil thought experiment clearly doesn’t speak to whether non-sentient life or natural beauty has intrinsic value. It’s restricted to that sub-domain of morality that concerns what we owe to each other, where this includes just those individuals over whom our veil-induced uncertainty about our identity extends: presently existing sentient beings, perhaps. 11 11 Accordingly, any verdicts reached via the veil of ignorance will still need to be weighed against what we might yet owe to any excluded others (such as future generations, or non-welfarist values).Still, in many contexts other factors will not be relevant, and the question of what we morally ought to do will reduce to the question of how we should treat each other. Many of the deepest disagreements between utilitarians and their critics concern precisely this question. And the veil of ignorance seems relevant here. The fact that some action is what everyone affected would personally prefer from behind the veil of ignorance seems to undermine critics’ claims that any individual has been mistreated by, or has grounds to complain about, that action.Ex Ante ParetoA Pareto improvement is better for some people, and worse for none. When outcomes are uncertain, we may instead assess the prospect associated with an action—the range of possible outcomes, weighted by their probabilities. A prospect can be assessed as better for you when it offers you greater well-being in expectation, or ex ante. 12 12 Putting these concepts together, we may formulate the following principle:Ex ante Pareto: in a choice between two prospects, one is morally preferable to another if it offers a better prospect for some individuals and a worse prospect for none.This bridge between personal value (or well-being) and moral assessment is further developed in economist John Harsanyi’s aggregation theorem. 13 13 But the underlying idea, that reasonable beneficence requires us to wish well to all, and prefer prospects that are in everyone’s ex ante interests, has also been defended and developed in more intuitive terms by philosophers. 14 14A powerful objection to most non-utilitarian views is that they sometimes violate ex ante Pareto, such as when choosing policies from behind the veil of ignorance. Many rival views imply, absurdly, that prospect Y could be morally preferable to prospect X, even when Y is worse in expectation for everyone involved.Caspar Hare illustrates the point with a Trolley case in which all six possible victims are stuffed inside suitcases: one is atop a footbridge, five are on the tracks below, and a train will hit and kill the five unless you topple the one on the footbridge (in which case the train will instead kill this one and then stop before reaching the others). 15 15 As the suitcases have recently been shuffled, nobody knows which position they are in. So, from each victim’s perspective, their prospects are best if you topple the one suitcase off the footbridge, increasing their chances of survival from 1/6 to 5/6. Given that this is in everyone’s ex ante interests, it’s deeply puzzling to think that it would be morally preferable to override this unanimous preference, shared by everyone involved, and instead let five of the six die; yet that is the implication of most non-utilitarian views. 16 16Expanding the Moral CircleWhen we look back on past moral atrocities—like slavery or denying women equal rights—we recognize that they were often sanctioned by the dominant societal norms at the time. The perpetrators of these atrocities were grievously wrong to exclude their victims from their “circle” of moral concern. 17 17 That is, they were wrong to be indifferent towards (or even delight in) their victims’ suffering. But such exclusion seemed normal to people at the time. So we should question whether we might likewise be blindly accepting of some practices that future generations will see as evil but that seem “normal” to us. 18 18 The best protection against making such an error ourselves would be to deliberately expand our moral concern outward, to include all sentient beings—anyone who can suffer—and so recognize that we have strong moral reasons to reduce suffering and promote well-being wherever we can, no matter who it is that is experiencing it.While this conclusion is not yet all the way to full-blown utilitarianism, since it’s compatible with, for example, holding that there are side-constraints limiting one’s pursuit of the good, it is likely sufficient to secure agreement with the most important practical implications of utilitarianism (stemming from cosmopolitanism, anti-speciesism, and longtermism).The Poverty of the AlternativesWe’ve seen that there is a strong presumptive case in favor of utilitarianism. If no competing view can be shown to be superior, then utilitarianism has a strong claim to be the “default” moral theory. In fact, one of the strongest considerations in favor of utilitarianism (and related consequentialist views) is the deficiencies of the alternatives. Deontological (or rule-based) theories, in particular, seem to rest on questionable foundations. 19 19Deontological theories are explicitly non-consequentialist: instead of morally assessing actions by evaluating their consequences, these theories tend to take certain types of action (such as killing an innocent person) to be intrinsically wrong. 20 20 There are reasons to be dubious of this approach to ethics, however.The Paradox of DeontologyDeontologists hold that there is a constraint against killing: that it’s wrong to kill an innocent person even if this would save five other innocent people from being killed. This verdict can seem puzzling on its face. 21 21 After all, given how terrible killing is, should we not want there to be less of it? Rational choice in general tends to be goal-directed, a conception which fits poorly with deontic constraints. 22 22 A deontologist might claim that their goal is simply to avoid violating moral constraints themselves, which they can best achieve by not killing anyone, even if that results in more individuals being killed. While this explanation can render deontological verdicts coherent, it does so at the cost of making them seem awfully narcissistic, as though the deontologist’s central concern was just to maintain their own moral purity or “clean hands”.Deontologists might push back against this characterization by instead insisting that moral action need not be goal-directed at all. 23 23 Rather than only seeking to promote value (or minimize harm), they claim that moral agents may sometimes be called upon to respect another’s value (by not harming them, even as a means to preventing greater harm to others), which would seem an appropriately outwardly-directed, non-narcissistic motivation.The challenge remains that such a proposal makes moral norms puzzlingly divergent from other kinds of practical norms. If morality sometimes calls for respecting value rather than promoting it, why is the same not true of prudence? (Given that pain is bad for you, for example, it would not seem prudent to refuse a painful operation now if the refusal commits you to five comparably painful operations in future.) Deontologists may offer various answers to this question, but insofar as we are inclined to think, pre-theoretically, that ethics ought to be continuous with other forms of rational choice, that gives us some reason to prefer consequentialist accounts. 24 24Deontologists also face a tricky question about where to draw the line. Is it at least okay to kill one person to prevent a hundred killings? Or a million? Absolutists never permit killing, no matter the stakes. But such a view seems too extreme for many. Moderate deontologists allow that sufficiently high stakes can justify violations. But how high? Any answer they offer is apt to seem arbitrary and unprincipled. Between the principled options of consequentialism or absolutism, many will find consequentialism to be the more plausible of the two.The Hope ObjectionImpartial observers should want and hope for the best outcome. Non-consequentialists claim, nonetheless, that it’s sometimes wrong to bring about the best outcome. Putting the two claims together yields the striking result that you should sometimes hope that others act wrongly.Suppose it would be wrong for some stranger—call him Jack—to kill one innocent person to prevent five other (morally comparable) killings. Non-consequentialists may claim that Jack has a special responsibility to ensure that he does not kill anyone, even if this results in more killings by others. But you are not Jack. From your perspective as an impartial observer, Jack’s killing one innocent person is no more or less intrinsically bad than any of the five other killings that would thereby be prevented. You have most reason to hope that there is only one killing rather than five. So you have reason to hope that Jack acts “wrongly” (killing one to save five). But that seems odd.More than merely being odd, this might even be taken to undermine the claim that deontic constraints matter, or are genuinely important to abide by. After all, to be important just is to be worth caring about. For example, we should care if others are harmed, which validates the claim that others’ interests are morally important. But if we should not care more about Jack’s abiding by the moral constraint against killing than we should about his saving five lives, that would seem to suggest that the constraint against killing is not in fact more morally important than saving five lives.Finally, since our moral obligations ought to track what is genuinely morally important, if deontic constraints are not in fact important then we cannot be obligated to abide by them. 25 25 We cannot be obliged to prioritize deontic constraints over others’ lives, if we ought to care more about others’ lives than about deontic constraints. So deontic constraints must not accurately describe our obligations after all. Jack really ought to do whatever would do the most good overall, and so should we.Skepticism About the Distinction Between Doing and AllowingYou might wonder: if respect for others requires not harming them (even to help others more), why does it not equally require not allowing them to be harmed? Deontological moral theories place great weight on distinctions such as those between doing and allowing harm, or killing and letting die, or intended versus merely foreseen harms. But why should these be treated so differently? If a victim ends up equally dead either way, whether they were killed or “merely” allowed to die would not seem to make much difference to them—surely what matters to them is just their death. Consequentialism accordingly denies any fundamental significance to these distinctions. 26 26Indeed, it’s far from clear that there is any robust distinction between “doing” and “allowing”. Sometimes you might “do” something by remaining perfectly still. 27 27 Also, when a doctor unplugs a terminal patient from life support machines, this is typically thought of as “letting die”; but if a mafioso, worried about an informant’s potentially incriminating testimony, snuck in to the hospital and unplugged the informant’s life support, we are more likely to judge it to constitute “killing”. 28 28 Jonathan Bennett argues at length that there is no satisfactory, fully general distinction between doing and allowing—at least, none that would vindicate the moral significance that deontologists want to attribute to such a distinction. 29 29 If Bennett is right, then that might force us towards some form of consequentialism (such as utilitarianism) instead.Status Quo BiasOpposition to utilitarian trade-offs—that is, benefiting some at a lesser cost to others—arguably amounts to a kind of status quo bias, prioritizing the preservation of privilege over promoting well-being more generally.Such conservatism might stem from the Just World fallacy: the mistake of assuming that the status quo is just, and that people naturally get what they deserve. Of course, reality offers no such guarantees of justice. What circumstances one is born into depends on sheer luck, including one’s endowment of physical and cognitive abilities which may pave the way for future success or failure. Thus, even later in life we never manage to fully wrest back control from the whimsies of fortune and, consequently, some people are vastly better off than others despite being no more deserving. In such cases, why should we not be willing to benefit one person at a lesser cost to privileged others? They have no special entitlement to the extra well-being that fortune has granted them. 30 30 Clearly, it’s good for people to be well-off, and we certainly would not want to harm anyone unnecessarily. 31 31 However, if we can increase overall well-being by benefiting one person at the lesser cost to another, we should not refrain from doing so merely due to a prejudice in favor of the existing distribution. 32 32 It’s easy to see why traditional elites would want to promote a “morality” which favors their entrenched interests. It’s less clear why others should go along with such a distorted view of what (and who) matters.It can similarly be argued that there is no real distinction between imposing harms and withholding benefits. The only difference between the two cases concerns what we understand to be the status quo, which lacks moral significance. Suppose scenario A is better for someone than B. Then to shift from A to B would be a “harm”, while to prevent a shift from B to A would be to “withhold a benefit”. But this is merely a descriptive difference. If we deny that the historically given starting point provides a morally privileged baseline, then we must say that the cost in either case is the same, namely the difference in well-being between A and B. In principle, it should not matter where we start from. 33 33Now suppose that scenario B is vastly better for someone else than A is: perhaps it will save their life, at the cost of the first person’s arm. Nobody would think it okay to kill a person just to save another’s arm (that is, to shift from B to A). So if we are to avoid status quo bias, we must similarly judge that it would be wrong to oppose the shift from A to B—that is, we should not object to saving someone’s life at the cost of another’s arm. 34 34 We should not care especially about preserving the privilege of whoever stood to benefit by default; such conservatism is not truly fair or just. Instead, our goal should be to bring about whatever outcome would be best overall, counting everyone equally, just as utilitarianism prescribes.Evolutionary Debunking ArgumentsAgainst these powerful theoretical objections, the main consideration that deontological theories have going for them is closer conformity with our intuitions about particular cases. But if these intuitions cannot be supported by independently plausible principles, that may undermine their force—or suggest that we should interpret these intuitions as good rules of thumb for practical guidance, rather than as indicating what fundamentally matters.The force of deontological intuitions may also be undermined if it can be demonstrated that they result from an unreliable process. For example, evolutionary processes may have endowed us with an emotional bias favoring those who look, speak, and behave like ourselves; this, however, offers no justification for discriminating against those unlike ourselves. Evolution is a blind, amoral process whose only “goal” is the propagation of genes, not the promotion of well-being or moral rightness. Our moral intuitions require scrutiny, especially in scenarios very different from our evolutionary environment. If we identify a moral intuition as stemming from our evolutionary ancestry, we may decide not to give much weight to it in our moral reasoning—the practice of evolutionary debunking. 35 35Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer argue that views permitting partiality are especially susceptible to evolutionary debunking, whereas impartial views like utilitarianism are more likely to result from undistorted reasoning. 36 36 Joshua Greene offers a different psychological debunking argument. He argues that deontological judgments—for instance, in response to trolley cases—tend to stem from unreliable and inconsistent emotional responses, including our favoritism of identifiable over faceless victims and our aversion to harming someone up close rather than from afar. By contrast, utilitarian judgments involve the more deliberate application of widely respected moral principles. 37 37Such debunking arguments raise worries about whether they “prove too much”: after all, the foundational moral judgment that pain is bad would itself seem emotionally-laden and susceptible to evolutionary explanation—physically vulnerable creatures would have powerful evolutionary reasons to want to avoid pain whether or not it was objectively bad, after all! 38 38However, debunking arguments may be most applicable in cases where we feel that a principled explanation for the truth of the judgment is lacking. We do not tend to feel any such lack regarding the badness of pain—that is surely an intrinsically plausible judgment if anything is. Some intuitions may be over-determined: explicable both by evolutionary causes and by their rational merits. In such a case, we need not take the evolutionary explanation to undermine the judgment, because the judgment also results from a reliable process (namely, rationality). By contrast, deontological principles and partiality are far less self-evidently justified, and so may be considered more vulnerable to debunking. Once we have an explanation for these psychological intuitions that can explain why we would have them even if they were rationally baseless, we may be more justified in concluding that they are indeed rationally baseless.As such, debunking objections are unlikely to change the mind of one who is drawn to the target view (or regards it as independently justified and defensible). But they may help to confirm the doubts of those who already felt there were some grounds for scepticism regarding the intrinsic merits of the target view.ConclusionUtilitarianism can be supported by several theoretical arguments, the strongest perhaps being its ability to capture what fundamentally matters. Its main competitors, by contrast, seem to rely on dubious distinctions—like “doing” vs. “allowing”—and built-in status quo bias. At least, that is how things are apt to look to one who is broadly sympathetic to a utilitarian approach. Given the flexibility inherent in reflective equilibrium, these arguments are unlikely to sway a committed opponent of the view. For those readers who find a utilitarian approach to ethics deeply unappealing, we hope that this chapter may at least help you to better understand what appeal others might see in the view.However strong you judge the arguments in favor of utilitarianism to be, your ultimate verdict on the theory will also depend upon how well the view is able to counter the influential objections that critics have raised against it.The next chapter discusses theories of well-being, or what counts as being good for an individual.Next Chapter: Theories of Well-BeingHow to Cite This PageChappell, R.Y. and Meissner, D. (2023). Arguments for Utilitarianism. In R.Y. Chappell, D. Meissner, and W. MacAskill (eds.), An Introduction to Utilitarianism, <https://www.utilitarianism.net/arguments-for-utilitarianism>, accessed document.write((new Date).toLocaleDateString("en-US"))2/13/2026.

Camus is often classified as an existentialist writer, and it is easy to see why. Affinities with Kierkegaard and Sartre are patent. He shares with these philosophers (and with the other major writers in the existentialist tradition, from Augustine and Pascal to Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche) an habitual and intense interest in the active human psyche, in the life of conscience or spirit as it is actually experienced and lived. Like these writers, he aims at nothing less than a thorough, candid exegesis of the human condition, and like them he exhibits not just a philosophical attraction but also a personal commitment to such values as individualism, free choice, inner strength, authenticity, personal responsibility, and self-determination. However, one troublesome fact remains: throughout his career Camus repeatedly denied that he was an existentialist. Was this an accurate and honest self-assessment? On the one hand, some critics have questioned this “denial” (using the term almost in its modern clinical sense), attributing it to the celebrated Sartre-Camus political “feud” or to a certain stubbornness or even contrariness on Camus’s part. In their view, Camus qualifies as, at minimum, a closet existentialist, and in certain respects (e.g., in his unconditional and passionate concern for the individual) as an even truer specimen of the type than Sartre. On the other hand, besides his personal rejection of the label, there appear to be solid reasons for challenging the claim that Camus is an existentialist. For one thing, it is noteworthy that he never showed much interest in (indeed he largely avoided) metaphysical and ontological questions (the philosophical raison d’etre of Heidegger and Sartre). Of course there is no rule that says an existentialist must be a metaphysician. However, Camus’s seeming aversion to technical philosophical discussion does suggest one way in which he distanced himself from contemporary existentialist thought. Another point of divergence is that Camus seems to have regarded existentialism as a complete and systematic world-view, that is, a fully articulated doctrine. In his view, to be a true existentialist one had to commit to the entire doctrine (and not merely to bits and pieces of it), and this was apparently something he was unwilling to do. A further point of separation, and possibly a decisive one, is that Camus actively challenged and set himself apart from the existentialist motto that being precedes essence. Ultimately, against Sartre in particular and existentialists in general, he clings to his instinctive belief in a common human nature. In his view human existence necessarily includes an essential core element of dignity and value, and in this respect he seems surprisingly closer to the humanist tradition from Aristotle to Kant than to the modern tradition of skepticism and relativism from Nietzsche to Derrida (the latter his fellow-countryman and, at least in his commitment to human rights and opposition to the death penalty, his spiritual successor and descendant).

HICS, Peirce has said, depends onaesthetics, i.e., judgments of oughtdepend on the delineation of anideal, of what is admirable and what isnot.' Existentialism has given to the ad-mirable a new location-and hence byimplication has relocated judgments ofmoral value. What the existentialist ad-mires is not the happiness of a man's life,the goodness of his disposition, or therightness of his acts but the authenticityof his existence. This is, I think, theunique contribution of existentialism toethical theory. There are, of course, otherethical principles involved in existentialphilosophy, but they are principles whichit has in common with other ethical sys-tems. For example, the existentialistdenies the practical supremacy of reason,he denies the universality of moralvalues, he asserts the all-importance,ethically, of the historic individual in hisunique situation-all these tenets theexistentialist shares with numerous othermoralists, past and present. They aretenets which will appear obvious truthsto those who believe them and obviousfalsehoods to those who disbelieve them;in either event they are not unique. Butthe stress on authenticity is, I think, aunique existentialist emphasis-and animportant one.There are, in contemporary existen-tialism, two principal versions of thisnew ethical concept. For Heidegger,genuine existence is existence whichdares to face death: rising from the dis-sipating and deceptive consolations of to-day's concerns to the inner realizationthat its own past must take shape and sig-nificance in relation to its inevitable lasttomorrow. Contrasted with such genuineexistence is Verfallen, the distraction orscattering of one's freedom in the cares ofeveryday, where not the true individual,but das man, the indifferent "they," issovereign. In Sartre, on the other hand,genuine existence is conceived of as free,not in facing death so much as in facingthe meaningless ground of its own tran-scendence; that is, the fact that thevalues by which I live depend not ondivine fiat or metaphysical necessity buton myself alone. Contrasted with suchawareness is bad faith, the stultificationof freedom in the enslavement to an "ob-jective" truth or a consuming passion.In both versions, the concept ofauthenticity is rooted in the existentialinterpretation of freedom. We live frombirth to death under the compulsion ofbrute fact; yet out of the mere givennessof situation it is we ourselves who shapeourselves and our world. And in thisshaping we succeed or fail. To succeed isnot to escape compulsion but to tran-scend it-to give it significance andmeaning by our own projection of the ab-surdly given past into a directed future.But such shaping of contingency, suchimposition of meaning on the meaning-less, is possible only through the veryrecognition of meaninglessness-of thenothingness that underlies our lives.Such recognition means, for Sartre, theawareness, in dread, that the values bywhich I live are totally, absurdly mine;the contingency, the compulsion I mustface is the irrevocable givenness of myown creation. In the more radical concep-266AUTHENTICITY: AN EXISTENTIAL VIRTUE 267tion of Heidegger it is not the absurdity,the nothingness, of life which must befaced but the ultimate nothingness, thelast and total contingency of death,which must inwardly determine as it out-wardly delimits my existence. Thus forSartre it is a peculiar attitude towardfreedom in its relation to value that de-fines authentic existence; for Heideggerit is the orientation to the end of life, theresolve to death, that is essential toauthenticity. In both cases authenticityis a kind of honesty or a kind of courage;the authentic individual faces somethingwhich the unauthentic individual isafraid to face.If, in authentic existence, freedom caninform necessity and give meaning to themeaningless, it may also fail of its tran-scendence, it may succumb to the mul-tiplicity and absurdity of fact, it mayseek escape in the fiction of a supportingcosmic morality or in the domination ofa blind passion or in the nagging distrac-tions of its everyday concerns. In otherwords, freedom is not an abstraction tobe generically applied to "man" as such,but a risk, a venture, a demand. In asense we are all free, but we are free toachieve our freedom or to lose it. Thereare no natural slaves, but most of us haveenslaved ourselves. Existentialism is, inthis, a kind of inverse Spinozism. LikeSpinoza, it sees man as bond or free; only,unlike Spinoza, it finds in reason not aliberator but one of the possible enslaversand in imagination of a sort the sourcenot of enslavement but of emancipationfrom it.It should be noticed, however, that inHeidegger's conception the sphere of thenonauthentic, of Verfallen, is always withus. There is no easy distinction betweenthose who, leaving the fraudulent behindthem, achieve the level of genuine exist-ence and those who do not. We are all,always, a prey to the cares of here andnow; of a thousand and one trivialitiesall our days are made. Yet there is an es-sential, qualitative, recognizable differ-ence, a total difference, morally, betweenthe existence for which the trivialitiesare the whole and the existence for whichthe manifold of experience is transcendedin a unity not, like the Kantian, abstractand universal but intensely personal andconcrete.What does it mean to say, as Heideg-ger does, that what constitutes this unityis a "resolve to death," that it is "beingto death" or "freedom to death" whichemancipates the individual from bondageto the "they"? The arguments by whichHeidegger develops this thesis cannot betaken seriously as arguments. Like mostof his arguments they consist principallyin inversions of ground and consequentand in the kind of word play in whichGerman philosophy from Hegel onabounds. For example, if empirically it isfound that various peoples and individu-als face death in various ways, he can de-fine personal existence as "being todeath" and say that it is not the case thatdeath is essential to existence becausepeople die and face the fact of dying but,much more profoundly, people die andface the fact of dying because existenceis being to death. In other words, a pos-terioris are turned into a prioris: and,presto, there is the philosopher possessedof a foresight far finer than the hindsightof the ordinary man. Or, for instance, hecan play, much as Aristotle does withtelos in the Politics, with the meaning of"end": death is the end of life, and there-fore the end of life, etc.Yet, although Sein und Zeit is a tissueof this sort of pseudo-definition and re-definition, there is in its central thesis aserious truth. For the individual de-prived of supernatural support, cast268 ETHICSalone into his world, the dread of deathis a haunting if suppressed theme thatruns through life. What is more, if at alltimes communication between men istattered and fragile, it is in the face ofdeath that each man stands most strik-ingly and irrevocably alone. For thisEveryman there is after all no guide inhis most need to go by his side; and there-fore, more intensely than for his medievalcounterpart, his relation to death marksas nothing else does the integrity and in-dependence of his life. Thus, if authen-ticity is rare, authenticity in youth onemay expect to find extremely rare, for itis a virtue that flowers only in andthrough dread, in the living presence ofits own mortality.Yet whether "being to death" is thesole content and meaning of existentialauthenticity, as Heidegger makes it, isanother question. That the awareness ofdeath is a significant factor in any con-scious life is certain-and to have shownthis is an extremely important service ofSein und Zeit to contemporary thought.For this is, so far as I know, the first timesince Plato that death has been givencentral philosophic significance in the in-terpretation of life. In the case of Lucre-tius, for example, the fear of death and inthat of Hobbes the fear of violent deathare hinges, so to speak, on which theirphilosophic systems are hung; but theyare not, like Heidegger's "resolve todeath," internal to the analysis of life it-self. Whatever moralists wish to do here-after with this concept, they must cer-tainly reckon with it.On the other hand, in the fashion inwhich Heidegger presents it, the empha-sis on death involves an inescapable nar-rowness which warps the total concep-tion of the authentic individual. It isonly a man's death, Heidegger says,which is irreplaceably his own, which isnot interchangeable with the experienceof others; and therefore it is only in "be-ing to death" that he escapes the claimsof the public and corrupting "they" andis genuinely himself, genuinely free. His"freedom to death," the confrontationwith this one fact which is really his own,is the whole content and meaning of hisfreedom, and the existence of otherselves as of the world is for him only ameans to the achievement of this grimand lonely triumph. But this is not onlyemancipation from the bewildering dis-traction of the anonymous "they"; it isemancipation from all that might, by ourown creation, be made meaningful. It isindeed a transcendence of the meaning-less manifold, but a transcendence toodearly bought, for the very oneness andintensity of the achievement make it it-self almost empty of meaning. This isagain the Nullpunktsexistenz of Kierke-gaard, from which even God himself hasvanished. Personal authenticity is a sig-nificant ethical concept, and the relationof the individual to death is an essentialaspect of it, but it is not an aspect whichcan stand alone as Heidegger makes itdo. If nothing else, some relation toothers in their authenticity, some livingcommunication or the attempt at it,must play a part. But Heidegger'sauthentic individual wanders his solitary"wood paths," and they are not after allvery admirable roads to follow nor is it avery admirable sort of man who followsthem.If, then, Heidegger's definition ofauthentic existence is inadequate, that ofSartre may at first glance appear morefruitful. For Sartre, again, the honesty ofthe authentic person consists in his facingthe nature of his own freedom. This de-scription, since it is tied to life ratherthan to its cessation, does not seem, es-sentially, to entail the same narrownessAUTHENTICITY: AN EXISTENTIAL VIRTUE 269as does Heidegger's version. Yet as theFrench existentialists have developedtheir theory they have, I think, impover-ished as much as they have enriched theconcept of authenticity.For one thing, instead of amplifyingthe concept of das Sein zum Tode or pro-ceeding from it, Sartre has, in his theo-retical statements, dismissed it rathercavalierly. My death, he says, since itcan never become part of my own experi-ence, is more real to others than to me. Itis true, of course, that the death ofothers, of those near to me in particular,forms an essential part of my experiencein a fashion which Heidegger ought tobut does not recognize. But my own rela-tion to my own death does also, in itsparadoxical fashion, constitute an essen-tial element in my experience. Sartrehimself has given a brilliant account ofthe most dramatic and visible kind of"being to death" in his moving tributeto the Resistance, The Republic ofSilence:Exile, captivity and especially death (whichwe usually shrink from facing at all in happiertimes) became for us the habitual objects of ourconcern. We learned that they were neitherinevitable accidents, nor even constant and exte-rior dangers, but that they must be consideredas our lot itself, our destiny, the profound sourceof our reality as men.. . . Thus the basicquestion of liberty was posed, and we werebrought to the verge of the deepest knowledgethat man can have of himself. For the secretof a man is not his Oedipus complex or his in-feriority complex: it is the limit of his ownliberty, his capacity for resisting torture anddeath.2And he has, though perhaps less success-fully, dealt with similar themes in suchworks as The Wall or The Unburied Dead.But theoretically, it seems, he is toomuch interested in what is called the"open future"-or perhaps the indefiniteextent of open futures which the existen-tial revolutionary needs to envisage-tobe much concerned, philosophically, withthe individual's awareness of death. Yetthe concept of authenticity needs thissharp edge to mark it. Genuine existenceis revealed for what it is in relation towhat Jaspers called Grenzsituationen, andthe dreadful awareness of my own crea-tion of myself in indeed such a situation.But my death is the most dramatic ofsuch boundary situations-and in fact itis more than that; it is the essential anddetermining boundary situation. If it isterrible that I am responsible for what Ihave become, it is always hopeful to re-flect that tomorrow I may do better. Butwhat is most terrible is that I cannot doso forever, that in fact if I have bungledand cheated and generally made a fool ofmyself, there is only a little while, per-haps not all of today even, in which to doit all over. Kierkegaard's favorite maxim,"over 70,000 fathoms, miles and milesfrom all human help, to be glad," is anessential constituent of existentialism,and in particular of the concept of theauthentic individual.And perhaps one may call on Kierke-gaard to support a second criticism ofSartre's conception of authenticity. Thistime it is the "knight of infinite resigna-tion" whom I should like to recall. It isnot necessary here to attempt to under-stand this character, let alone to endorsehim, so to speak, as a moral model, butthere is this about him which is impor-tant-though he is extremely differentfrom the ordinary sort of person, he may,Kierkegaard says, look and act just likehim. That, we have noticed, is true alsoof Heidegger's authentic person. In thecase of Sartre, however, those who liveby mauvaise foi are marked off from anelusive but admirable sort of individualwho presumably has left bad faith behindand lives entirely in the separate and dis-270 ETHICStinct area of authenticity. Now the con-cept of bad faith has in fact served as akey for some brilliant portraits of varioussorts of depravity as, for example, in thePortrait of the Anti-Semite. Yet if onelooks, for instance, at the masterly pic-ture of life by mauvaisefoi painted in theopening episode of The Room, one getsthe feeling that the life of bad faith is theconventional one and, by implication,that of good faith unconventional. Infact this is, implicitly at least, the themeof the whole story-the story of a youngwoman who chooses to share the life ofher mad husband, even to try earnestlyand tragically to share his hallucina-tions, rather than to return to the va-cantly respectable existence of her horri-fied bourgeois parents. And here again, ifone equates convention with bourgeoisconvention, the interest of the existentialrevolutionary demands such a view. Lib-eration is the existential keynote allalong the line. It is the shackles of con-vention, of beliefs imposed from outside,that bind us personally, just as the eco-nomic interests of those who foster theconventions bind us socially. To cast offthe expressions of false privilege in ourprivate lives is to become authentic, tobecome ourselves, just as political revo-lution will, in this view, cast off for us theshackes that bind us in our economic andpolitical lives.Now of course it is true that theauthentic person is seldom a convention-al person. The concept of authenticity isnot a concept of adjustment-in factwith respect to the current ideal of thewell-adjusted member of society it istruly and deeply a heresy. One can evensay that some societies almost demandrebellion of a sort as the price of authen-ticity. Yet there may be authentic indi-viduals who live all their lives, like theknight of infinite resignation, as highlyrespectable members of highly respect-able societies. Elizabeth Bennett is anauthentic individual, though she neverdid anything more unconventional thanto walk three miles on a rather muddyday. Sartre's authentic existent, on theother hand, deprived of all the triviali-ties and all the substance of Verfallen andgiven only a highly mechanical un-Marxist Marxianism by which to live, re-mains a mere ideal, or a ghost of a per-son. Mathieu, for example, who in TheAge of Reason is a real person, has notachieved authenticity but is constantlyand desperately seeking it. He is unableto survive the Grenzsitucation which theFrench existentialists in their own per-sons met so courageously. Absurdly anddefiantly, he is killed during the fall ofFrance in 1940. The trouble is that anauthentic existent, as Sartre conceiveshim, has no end given him except his ownauthenticity; but authenticity is not somuch an end of acts as a value which isrealized as a by-product of acts. The fail-ure to recognize this essential complexityof the ethical situation is a serious lack ofexistentialism, as it is of most other sys-tematic moralities. Moralists seek to de-scribe the end of human action, but manyvalues, and perhaps the highest, are pro-duced as Hartmann puts it "on the backof the act." The self-consciousness in-volved in seeking them makes them im-possible to find. And authenticity is sucha value. Those who attain it are doingand seeking what others are doing andseeking; the unique and in a sense time-less value their life exhibits is a qualifyof, but not an end for, that life itself.But this lack of complexity reflects adeeper lack, for the central difficultywhich underlies all these errors or omis-sions of existentialism is the narrownessof the existential view of the free act. Itis because of that narrowness that theAUTHENTICITY: AN, EXISTENTIAL VIRTUE 271existential hero has nothing to seek buthis own authentic act. The existentialisthas rightly seen that, "thrown into theworld," always already "engaged," weare nevertheless each totally responsiblefor our own destinies. But by singling outthe act alone by which a man faces hisown "condemnation to be free," theexistentialist isolates part of a complexsituation which cannot in fact be so iso-lated. It is true that it is I who have-al-ways-already-chosen the values by whichI live. But I have chosen, not createdthem; if they were not in some sensethere to be chosen, if they did not some-how compel me to choose them, theywould not be values at all. I could noteven, like Kirillov, choose suicide as thenegation of all values. Sartre says thatvalues "start up like partridges beforeour acts." That is how it looks in the re-flective moment of dread-but the aspectof total responsibility is only one aspectof a more complex situation. The choiceis my choice, yet it is also the choice ofsomething-and of something thatobliges me to choose it. For Sartre, how-ever, there is a crude and absolute dis-junction between the free act of genuineexistence and the bad faith of belief invalues as metaphysically self-existent orsupernaturally revealed. Either I myself,all alone, simply act or I enslave myselfto a falsely hypostatized being; hence thedesperate endeavor to make of the act it-self-of my freedom as such or the hones-ty to face my freedom-the whole endand object of the free man. But there areno pure acts. An act involves a referenceto values which in some way make aclaim on the agent and perhaps, at leastindirectly, bind him to other agents or tothose affected by his acts.It is probably in some such context,moreover, that the problems of the rela-tions between individuals need to betreated. And that brings me to my finalcriticism, that is, the all too familiar butnecessary objection that the authenticindividual, while facing with admirablecourage the ultimate loneliness of humanlife, is nevertheless even lonelier than cir-cumstances warrant. To be sure, Sartreand, presumably with his knowledge andassent, Beauvoir have tried in variousways to meet this common objection,but, in my opinion at least, with verylittle success.They try to relate one self to others inaccordance with two favorite maxims(each of which is the slogan for a Beau-voir novel): Hegel's "Every conscious-ness wants the death of another" andDostoevski's "We are all responsible forall." The Hegelian maxim serves as aguiding principle for Sartre's detailedanalysis of the circle of conflicts in L'Etreet le Neant, and it also serves as a basis forthe description of class-consciousness andtherefore as a bridge to his theory of revo-lution. That it is not an adequate prin-ciple for a complete or essential analysisof human relationships has been saidoften enough, and that some uneasinessis felt about it even at headquarters isevidenced by the extremely crude argu-ments with which Beauvoir has since at-tempted to dismiss it in The Ethics ofAmbiguity. The first view one takes ofanother, that the other consciousnesswants the death of mine, is naive, shesays, for one at once realizes that ofcourse, as we all know, if anyone takesanything away from me, he is really giv-ing it to me all the while. This is un-doubtedly one of the worst philosophicalarguments ever penned-not to mentionthe shocking fact that there are in thiscase four hundred pages of naivete in themaster's masterpiece. Nor have other at-tempts to get from the first to the secondmaxim had better success. Sartre and,272 ETHICSfollowing him, Beaufrom my concrete, indom to freedom as aalways with curious sophistry-exceptperhaps in the argument that I cannot befree unless others are so. It is true thatminimal requirements of civil and eco-nomic freedom are the sine qua non of myfreedom. Yet we believe in freedom forothers not only because it facilitates ourown. This argument, though valid, is in-sufficient. And what is worse, the politicswhich is developed on this basis has,despite its opposition to dialectical ma-terialism, the same lifeless and mechani-cal quality as the article it seeks to re-place. One need only instance the longseries of articles called What Is Litera-ture? in which, after a rather ingeniousanalysis of the differences between thearts, Sartre embarks on a completelystock Marxian account of the functionsof the prose writer, in which RichardWright becomes the greatest Americannovelist and Flaubert is no good becausehe did not take his political responsibili-ties seriously, and so on.Yet it does seem likely that somehowand in some sense the concept of authen-ticity does involve not only the winningof freedom but the respect for freedom,not only the achievement of dignity inthe individual but the acceptance of theKantian maxim of the dignity of all indi-viduals. Some such connection does seemto exist; one cannot imagine an authenticindividual who really has no respect forthe liberty of others, and one cannotimagine the existence of authenticitywhere some sort of liberty does not exist,in idea even if not in fact. But there hasbeen, so far as I know, no convincingphilosophic statement why this should beso. Certainly to take away substantivevalues as mauvaise foi and then to putfreedom back in as a substantive value isnot good enough. But on the other hand,like Heidegger, to view the existence ofothers only as a means to my freedom isworse than not good enough-it is posi-tively evil. Yet it is difficult, at least inexistential language, to say why.Perhaps this failure of existentialism-its failure adequately to relate my free-dom to freedom in general-is connectedwith the more limited or more concreteproblem which it equally fails to treat,that is, the problem of the manner inwhich authenticity is determined or de-fined or influenced by the direct relationof one individual to another in his free-dom. Both Jaspers and Marcel have in-troduced concepts of communication intoexistentialism, but in both cases thetreatment is so vague and sentimental asto contribute little. Yet it is here, in thequestion of communication as well as inthe implications of the concept of authen-tic existence for the general concept ofliberty, that more needs to be said.Is it wholly in loneliness that authen-ticity is achieved? If genuine existence istranscendence successfully accomplished,giving form and meaning to the meaning-less succession of hours and needs, does itnot, in transcending contingency andnothingness, in some sense transcendloneliness as well? Is not-sometimes, atleast-the transcendence of lonelinessneeded for the very achievement ofauthenticity? True, authenticity itself,the core of genuine existence, is a valuewhich must center in the individual whobears it; the inner dissipation of the selfin seeming devotion to other selves is,existentially speaking, deeply immoral.Even the "self-sacrifice" of an authenticperson perfects and dignifies the individ-ual and inalienable person that is him-self. Yet, if one can distinguish betweena fraudulent and an authentic aspect ofthe self, may one not distinguish also be-AUTHENTICITY: AN EXISTENTIAL VIRTUE 273tween a fraudulent and an authentic rela-tion between selves? The quality of theconcern with others on the distractivelevel is evident in all gregariousness; itsmost extreme expression, perhaps, is thecozy friendliness of radio announcers totheir disembodied audience. But, in theprojection toward one's own freedomwhich focuses distraction into authen-ticity, the bewildered and bewilderingdiffusion of everyday sociability wouldseem likewise to be, if not replaced, atleast reoriented in the direction of a gen-uine and decisive reaching-out to the fewothers whose existence shows a signifi-cant kinship to one's own. Even ifauthenticity is in an essential aspect "be-ing to death," it is in that very aspect, inthe light of the ultimate dissolution ofthe person loved or loving, that the ur-gency and the reality of communicationare most strikingly exhibited. In short,between the two Beauvoir maxims, be-tween the sadism of the Hegelian masterand the sainthood of Zossima, there lies awhole range of kinds of and endeavors atcommunication-of times and places inwhich, fleetingly and in devious ways,perhaps, but still truly, minds do meet.And, without the actuality and possibili-ty of such meetings, the irrevocableloneliness of human life, however authen-tic, would be indeed too great to bear.But whether existential philosophy assuch can produce an adequate solutionfor this problem-whether it can buildagain the bridge it has broken-is an-other question. Every philosophy "ex-plains" only such phenomena as itspremises already include; it can onlyamplify what its basic beliefs already as-sert. So, for example, Descartes's failureto understand the living-both animallife and human passion-is determinedby the concept of "clear and distinctidea" with which he starts. If, then, forthe existentialists the beginning is the in-dividual in loneliness and peril, the wholecontent of their doctrine is the elabora-tion and expansion of this same theme:and, to go further, to describe the ties ofmen as well as their isolation, their loyal-ties as well as their momentary decisions,demands at least, as we have suggestedearlier, a recognition of the complexity ofthe free act, of the element in every actof submission to a claim as well as re-sponsibility for choosing to submit.This is not to deny the significance ofthe existential insight but to demand itsinterpretation in a wider, other thanexistential, setting. Without some suchimmersion in a more inclusive view ofman's nature, existentialism remains asignificant but static insight into one as-pect of human consciousness. True, it isan aspect peculiarly characteristic of ourpresent mentality, and existentialism is aphilosophy peculiarly descriptive of thecrisis of our time. But it is the kind ofphilosophy which sees something thatmust be seen and goes no further. And togo further, or rather to go back, to makea new and richer beginning, is no longerexistentialism. Yet if, for the existential-ist, freedom is transcendence, he shouldperhaps be willing to acknowledge that,in the projective creation of the future,existentialism itself is among the data tobe transcended

BERT CAMUS sought, in TheMlyth of Sisyphus, to establishthe absurdity of the humancondition.2 There and in The Rebel hefurther sought to derive an ethic fromthat condition-the ethic of the absurdman. Here we shall see that in thesecond task he failed completely, while,in the first, partial success is purchasedat the price of triviality and, even so,rests on .paradoxical ambiguities in hisnotion of "absurdity."To grasp Camus's notion of the ab-surd, one must juxtapose it against abackground of the philosophical ideasof the Greek Neo-Platonist, Plotinus.Plotinus envisioned the world as a"chain of Being." That is, he conceivedof reality as a hierarchical arrangementof different sorts of entities culminatingin the One or Absolute. Embracing theeternal and unchanging Platonic ideas,or essences, as a pattern for "explain-ing" or "accounting for" the varied andchanging world of ordinary experience,Plotinus felt that the Platonic formsthemselves required an explanation. Hedid so primarily from one of the mostbasic and pervasive motives that hasentranced philosophers from the days ofthe Greeks to the present-the idea thatdiversity has to be explained in termsof some ultimate unity. For, where dis-tinctions remain, the monist feels thatthe relationships among the diversethings require explanation. The searchfor an explanation, on this pattern, canonly come to rest in some all-embracingunity, which, allowing of no distinctionswithin itself, somehow accounts for allthe diversity that there is and, in turn,requires no explanation. It is, in itsway, the old idea of the one and themany. Plato sought to account for themany particulars of a certain kind interms of the universal form in whichthey all participated. But, for Plotinus,the Platonic forms, being many, couldnot then be the ultimate source of ex-planation and, hence, of reality. The ul-timate sources of explanation and realitycoalesce, since to explain a thing is toaccount for its being in terms of someother entity. Thus the explanatory orderreflects the "chain of Being." The ulti-mate level of explanation and source ofreality could then only be some absoluteunity. Being the source of the Platonicforms, the One was not, in turn, a formor idea itself. Since the ideas or formsalso functioned as the objects andmeans of rational thought, the One washeld to be incapable of being rationallycomprehended. Another line of reason-ing led to the same conclusion. Rationalthought, for Plotinus, inescapably in-volved two dualisms: that of knowerand known and that of subject andpredicate. First, in thought there wasthe distinction between the knower andthe object of knowledge and, second,judgments involved ascribing a predi-cate to a subject. Rational thought,involving such dualisms, was thus heldto be incapable of comprehending abso-lute unity. The comprehension of theOne must then go beyond rationalthought and beyond all dualisms. Pla-8788 ETHICStonic rationalism, pushed to this ex-treme, lapses or, perhaps, leaps intomysticism. In the mystic experience theOne is finally reached and grasped. Butthe diversity characteristic of reasonand ordinary experience must be avoid-ed, hence the soul, in experiencing andcomprehending the Absolute, becomes"one with the One." The mystic finallyescapes diversity and gains comprehen-sion by being absorbed into the Abso-lute.By providing the ultimate explana-tion for, and source of, all things, theOne constitutes the productive cause ofall else. The pattern of Plotinus thusprovides a dividend, for not only doesthe soul fulfil its desire to comprehendin the obliterating mystical experience,but it attains the very source and causeof its existence. In reaching the One, itjoins the highest link in the chain ofbeing and, consequently, achieves salva-tion. Starting out to explain the ordi-nary world, one thus ends by discoveringits insignificance and the need to fleefrom it to something higher. The Abso-lute provides a haven as well as anexplanation. By so doing, it gives manan end or destiny, union with it, as wellas an ethic. One's life is to be lived soas to prepare for salvation. This is aunion not only with the ultimate sourceof reality but with the absolute good,for the One, as man's final end, is theultimate source of value. The "chain ofbeing" is simultaneously a "chain ofvalue," and something is good insofaras it is real. If one then asks how evilcan come from the ultimate source ofall, which is the absolute good, one istold that evil is simply the absence ofgoodness or reality and, as such, is non-being. The further one gets from theAbsolute, the lower one sinks on thechain of being and of value. Since theordinary world is the lowest link, toflee it is to flee from a lesser state ofbeing and of value to the highest ofboth-to the true, the good, and thebeautiful.One can see, on the basis of the pre-ceding sketch of Plotinus' view, someof the things that would appeal toChristians eager to find a metaphysicaldefense for their faith. However, thereare pitfalls. One is the so-called prob-lem of evil. Unlike Augustine, some mayfeel that there is still a puzzle in recon-ciling the absolute goodness of God withthe evils of the world. The contrastseems, if we may anticipate, "absurd."A second problem is found in the deter-ministic element of Plotinus' worldview. The Absolute is not modeled ona mind confronted with choices aboutwhich it exercises its free will. Thethings of this world are explained by theAbsolute's being their necessary groundor condition. Hence all flows from it asrigorously as theorems from axioms indeductive systems. Orthodox Christian-ity obviously cannot make its peacewith such a theme. In part the issueerupted in the Middle Ages in the scho-lastic attempts to reconcile a personalGod's "knowledge" of all with man'sfreedom to create the future. For, somewondered, in what sense does man free-ly create what God knew he would do?These problems are not confined toChristians. They will bother anyonesimultaneously intoxicated with thePlotinian pattern, man's freedom, andevil. Camus is such a one. Around thesethemes he attempts to construct anethic

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