which your younger brothers are serving without hesitation or remorse have under-
taken race murder, you are without a shadow of a doubt, executioners.
(WE 25 )
If the political and the ethical have been moving in parallel streams in
Sartre’s works, often watering the same landscape, they come into full
confluence in the concept ofcollective responsibilitywhen he concludes:
“But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned
by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place
you in the ranks of the oppressors.”^5 We shall follow these streams and
their confluence in this chapter and the next.
The first stream: stages on Sartre’s ethical way
It is common to gather Sartre’s reflections on ethics into two or even
three stages, reflecting his respective methods and ontologies. The initial
stage is the phenomenological, followed by the dialectical and finally,
what may be called the “dialogical.” We shall consider each stage in
terms of the major works that ground and exhibit it. For the ethics
of authenticity, the leading work is Sartre’s posthumously published
Notebooks for an Ethics, though many of its insights were anticipated in
texts that we have already discussed, like What is Literature? His
dialectical ethics is formulated in the notes for a single lecture, “Ethics
and Society” presented at the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1964 , and a
series of talks, “Ethics and History,” scheduled for delivery at Cornell
University the following year but canceled in objection to America’s
escalation of its war in Vietnam.^6 The social ontology of theCritique
(^5) WE 25. I have discussed Sartre’s concept and use of “collective responsibility” at length in
SME, especially partsiiandiii. For a fine analysis of the Sartre–Camus controversy, see
Ronald Aronson,Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It
(University of Chicago Press, 2004 ), and a collection edited and translated by David A.
Sprintzen and Adrian van den Hoven,Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation(Amherst,
6 NY: Humanity Books,^2004 ).
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Morals and Society” (or) “Socialist Ethics” is discussed in several essays
by Elizabeth Bowman and Robert Stone, such as “Dialectical Ethics: A First Look at Sartre’s
Unpublished 1964 Rome Lecture Notes,”Social Textnos. 13 – 14 (winter/spring 1986 ):
195 – 215 (hereafter DE), as well as by Thomas Anderson inSartre’s Two Ethics. See essays
by all three inSartre Alive, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (Detroit, MI:
Wayne State University Press, 1991 ) (hereafterSA), and by Bowman and Stone inSartre
264 Ends and Means: existential ethics