Existentialism’s Take on Human Freedom and Ethics

Most of us experience freedom as a positive thing – the ability to make choices, shape our lives, and pursue what matters to us. But Jean-Paul Sartre, the defining voice of 20th-century existentialism, offered a far more unsettling picture. For Sartre, freedom is not a gift. It is a burden we cannot put down, a condition we are thrown into without asking for it. His phrase – “man is condemned to be free” – captures something philosophically radical: that in a world without God or fixed human nature, every person bears total responsibility for who they are and what morality they live by. Understanding this claim means rethinking freedom, ethics, and what it means to live a genuinely human life.

Existence precedes essence: the foundation of everything 🔗

To follow Sartre’s argument on freedom, you first need to grasp his most foundational claim: existence precedes essence. Traditionally, philosophers – and most religious traditions – assumed that human beings have a fixed nature or purpose defined before they are born, whether by God, reason, or biology. Sartre rejects this entirely. As Britannica’s overview of existentialist ethics explains, Sartre held that because there is no God, human beings were not designed for any particular purpose, which is what the existentialists meant when they said existence precedes essence.

Think of a manufactured object, like a knife. The knife’s purpose – its essence – exists in the mind of its maker before the knife itself is produced. But for Sartre, no such maker designed you. You exist first, and only through your choices and actions do you define what kind of person you are. As Play For Thoughts explains it, humans are “thrown into the world” without instructions or justification – and this is precisely why Sartre declared we are condemned to be free. We cannot escape it, because even the choice to submit to someone else or follow a set of rules is still an act of free choice.

What “condemned to be free” actually means 🔗

The word “condemned” is deliberate and precise. In his landmark 1946 lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre wrote that man “did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.” He is condemned because he did not choose to exist, yet he cannot escape the responsibility of choosing. There is no higher authority – no divine commandment, no fixed human nature – to offload that responsibility onto.

This is not merely a philosophical puzzle. It has a very real emotional consequence that Sartre calls anguish. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, when we become aware of our freedom as an inescapable feature of the human condition, we realize that we alone are responsible for our choices and the projects we undertake, with no moral absolute, divine will, or natural law to guide or justify our actions. That awareness is anguish – not neurosis or depression, but the sober recognition that every decision we make is entirely our own, and there are no excuses behind us or justifications before us.

Epoché Magazine captures this well: on one hand, the radical throwing of human beings back onto themselves has an emancipatory character – no ideology or divine order can claim authority over our existence. On the other hand, this same condition means we are virtually condemned by our very existence to be free, and the burden that comes with that is inescapable.

Freedom and the creation of personal morality 🔗

If there is no God and no fixed human nature, then there is also no pre-given moral order. This is one of existentialism’s most provocative positions. The Ethics Centre describes existentialism’s view of the “absurd” as being born into a meaningless place that requires you to make meaning – and since there is no one truth and no inherent moral rules or guidelines, each person must develop their own moral code to live by.

For Sartre, this does not lead to the conclusion that anything goes. Instead, it means that morality is not discovered but created through action. As one analysis of Sartre’s work puts it, through our actions, we create the meaning and morality that guide us – what Sartre called a “heroic ethics,” an ethics of self-creation, where every individual must define their own values and continually strive to go beyond themselves.

Crucially, Sartre adds a further dimension: when we choose, we do not only choose for ourselves. In Existentialism is a Humanism, he argues that in making a choice, a person is simultaneously creating an image of what they believe a human being should be. As Philosophy Now’s guide to the lecture explains, Sartre believed the experience of this extended responsibility – choosing not just for oneself but for all of humanity – is what he calls anguish, comparable to the weight felt by a military commander whose decisions carry potentially grave consequences for those under their command. Our choices carry that kind of universal weight.

Being-for-itself and the structure of human consciousness 🔗

Sartre’s account of freedom is not just ethical; it is grounded in a detailed theory of consciousness. In his major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943), he distinguishes between two modes of being. Being-in-itself (en soi) refers to the solid, fixed existence of objects – a rock simply is what it is, with no capacity to reflect on itself or become otherwise. Being-for-itself (pour soi) refers to human consciousness, which is characterized by constant self-awareness, self-questioning, and negation. Unlike objects, human beings can always stand back from what they currently are and ask: must I continue to be this way?

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Sartre, this ontological distinction underpins his argument for radical human freedom. Consciousness is not a fixed thing; it is always beyond itself, always projecting toward future possibilities. Because of this, no factual state – not poverty, not circumstance, not upbringing – can compel consciousness to respond in any single predetermined way. We always make a choice, usually pre-reflectively, about the significance of our situation. This is why Sartre insists there is no determinism: man is free, man is freedom.

Bad faith: the escape from freedom we attempt – and fail 🔗

Given how heavy freedom is, it is hardly surprising that many people try to escape it. Sartre has a name for this: bad faith (mauvaise foi). Bad faith is the psychological phenomenon whereby individuals act inauthentically by yielding to external pressures and disowning their innate freedom as sentient beings. It is not straightforward lying to others – it is lying to oneself.

Sartre’s most famous illustration is the café waiter. Philosophy Break’s analysis of the waiter explains that the waiter is so intent on perfectly performing his role that he begins to define himself entirely as a waiter, suppressing all other dimensions of his existence. His movements are slightly too precise, his eagerness slightly too mechanical. He is, in effect, playing at being a thing – collapsing his boundless existential potential into a single social function, as if he had no choice but to be a waiter. Sartre’s point is not that having a job is bad faith. It is that convincing yourself that you are your job – that you have no freedom to be otherwise – is the self-deception bad faith involves.

Bad faith takes two broad forms. As one philosophical analysis explains, the first is affirming one’s facticity (one’s fixed, given circumstances) while denying transcendence (the freedom to go beyond them) – the person who says “I cannot change; this is just how I am.” The second is the opposite: affirming transcendence while denying facticity, as when someone refuses to acknowledge anything about their past or situation as real constraints, living in pure fantasy. Authentic existence requires holding both in valid coordination: recognizing what limits us without pretending those limits are absolute.

Importantly, as Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, bad faith does not excuse us from responsibility – it is itself a choice. Even the attempt to flee freedom is an exercise of freedom, which is why Sartre insists we are responsible even for our desire to escape responsibility. This is what makes bad faith philosophically troubling: there is no neutral ground on which to stand.

Authenticity as the existentialist ethical ideal 🔗

The alternative to bad faith is authenticity – the courageous acceptance of one’s freedom and responsibility. For Sartre and his partner Simone de Beauvoir, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, to be authentic is to recover and accept the ambiguous tension of the self: that we are always in the process of becoming, never a fixed, final thing. The task of existence involves acting and doing – realizing freedom through concrete projects in the world while taking responsibility for how those projects enhance or diminish freedom for others.

This is where existentialist ethics connects to social life. Sartre’s freedom is not the freedom of an isolated individual who simply does as they please. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, when we genuinely acknowledge that freedom is our essence, we must also acknowledge it as the essence of others – and work to help others realize their freedom as the condition for realizing our own. Freedom, in this sense, is not self-contained; it is bound up in the freedom of all. This gives Sartre’s existentialism a solidaristic dimension that critics often overlook.

Critiques and limits of Sartre’s position 🔗

Sartre’s philosophy has attracted serious philosophical objections, and it is worth taking them honestly. The most pressing is the problem of moral relativism. A critical analysis published in the International Journal of European Studies argues that Sartre’s framework cannot adequately distinguish between right and wrong actions – since prior to choice there is no right or wrong, it becomes difficult to condemn any action as objectively immoral. The paper points out that some acts are necessarily condemnable regardless of whether they are performed in good or bad faith, such as harming an innocent person – suggesting objective morality has a role Sartre underestimated.

A second critique concerns isolation. Philosophy Now notes that critics from both Marxist and Christian traditions argued that by concentrating so heavily on individual choice, existentialism risks ignoring human solidarity – the ties that bind communities and make collective ethical life possible. Sartre attempted a response in Existentialism is a Humanism by invoking something close to Kant’s universalizability, but Britannica’s ethics entry observes that he never fully reconciled this with the more radical subjectivism expressed elsewhere in his work.

Finally, questions arose about the plausibility of absolute freedom. Real human lives are shaped by material constraints – poverty, illness, systemic oppression – that limit options in ways Sartre’s framework sometimes seems to minimize. Later existentialists and feminist philosophers, including de Beauvoir, pushed back on this, arguing that freedom must be understood within the concrete, social situations in which people actually live.

Why Sartre’s existentialism still matters 🔗

Despite its difficulties, Sartre’s account of freedom and ethics remains one of the most honest confrontations with what it means to be a choosing, responsible being in a world that offers no ready-made answers. It refuses the comfort of blaming circumstances, nature, God, or upbringing for who we are. As one philosophical commentary puts it, to live authentically is to accept this freedom, to act with courage, and to create meaning in a world that offers none on its own. That is not pessimism – it is a demanding form of optimism, one that places human dignity squarely in our own hands.

Existentialism emerged in the aftermath of World War II, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes, against the backdrop of the Nazi death camps and atomic bombings – events that forced an entire generation to confront the human capacity for both freedom and atrocity. In that context, Sartre’s insistence that we cannot blame instinct, ideology, or orders for what we do was not abstract philosophy. It was an ethical reckoning with what human freedom truly costs.

What do you think? If morality is something each person must create rather than discover, does that make ethical life more or less meaningful – or does it depend entirely on what you choose to create? And if our choices implicitly set an example for all of humanity, as Sartre claims, how does that change the way you think about even small, everyday decisions?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/ethics-philosophy/Existentialism
2. https://www.playforthoughts.com/blog/jean-paul-sartre
3. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm
4. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
5. https://epochemagazine.org/56/the-burden-of-freedom-sartres-sleep-and-fromms-awakening/
6. https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-existentialism/
7. https://philosophynow.org/issues/15/A_students_guide_to_Jean-Paul_Sartres_Existentialism_and_Humanism
8. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_(existentialism)
10. https://philosophybreak.com/articles/sartre-waiter-bad-faith-and-the-harms-of-inauthenticity/
11. https://medium.com/@aakashpydi/jean-paul-sartre-the-concept-of-bad-faith-and-its-role-in-ethical-analysis-93f4553fa242
12. https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-notes/4468158
13. https://philarchive.org/archive/AKIJSE