Existentialist Humanism: Sartre’s Freedom-Based Ethics

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) stands as one of the most provocative voices in the history of moral philosophy. In the aftermath of World War II – a period when traditional moral certainties lay in ruins – Sartre delivered his landmark public lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, to thousands of Parisians who packed the hall at Club Maintenant in 1945. The lecture presented a bold, unflinching claim: there is no God, no pre-given human nature, and therefore no objective foundation for moral values. What humans are left with is the one thing that cannot be taken from them – freedom. And with that freedom comes a weight that is both exhilarating and terrifying: the full, inescapable responsibility for what we make of ourselves.

The starting point: no God, no essence, no moral blueprint 🔗

Sartre’s ethics cannot be understood without first grasping his atheism and what it implies. Most traditional moral systems – whether religious or Aristotelian – rest on the idea that human beings have a fixed nature or purpose. In religious frameworks, God designs humans with a specific essence in mind: morality flows from divine commandments or natural law. In Aristotelian ethics, one can identify “the good” for humans by understanding the end toward which human nature tends.

Sartre dismantles both of these foundations in one move. As Britannica explains, Sartre held that there is no God, and therefore humans were not designed for any particular purpose – a position the existentialists captured in the phrase “existence precedes essence.” The meaning is precise: a human being first exists, then defines what they are. There is no predetermined plan. Unlike a penknife – designed and manufactured with a function already in mind – a human being “first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.”

This is not a minor revision to ethics. It is a complete overhaul. If there is no divine architect and no fixed human nature, then there is no ready-made moral code to consult. In Sartre’s own words from the original lecture, with God absent, we are left with “neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse.” Humans must face existence without a script.

Radical freedom and the creation of moral values 🔗

If no objective values exist, where do values come from? For Sartre, they come from human freedom and the choices humans make. Freedom, in his philosophy, is not simply the liberty to act without interference – it is the very structure of human consciousness. Humans are “condemned to be free”: we did not choose to exist, yet from the moment we are thrown into the world, every action, every refusal to act, every surrender to habit is still a choice for which we are fully responsible.

This leads directly to Sartre’s account of how moral values are created. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, when a person exercises their freedom properly, the values they create carry a universal dimension – any other human being placed in the same situation could recognise them. Choosing is never a merely personal act. Sartre argues that when I choose, I implicitly commit not just myself but humanity as a whole. If I choose to deceive, I am declaring that deception is acceptable human conduct, and I must be willing to inhabit a world where everyone deceives. My choices, in this sense, are a form of legislation for all of humankind.

This is reminiscent of Kant’s categorical imperative – and deliberately so. In Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre moved toward a version of Kantian universalisability, suggesting that moral judgments must be applicable to all. The key difference is that for Kant, universal moral laws are grounded in reason and exist independently of individual choice. For Sartre, universality emerges from within the act of choosing itself – there is no prior moral law, only the universal weight that comes with exercising freedom authentically.

Three existential emotions: anguish, abandonment, and despair 🔗

Sartre describes the human condition in terms of three interconnected emotional states that arise from confronting radical freedom honestly.

Anguish 🔗

Anguish is the feeling that comes with recognising that your choices do not merely affect you – they define what it means to be human. The person who realises they are “not only the person they choose to be, but also a lawmaker who is choosing all mankind as well as themselves,” cannot escape a feeling of total and deep responsibility. This is anguish: not anxiety about a particular decision, but a confrontation with the fact that no decision is ever small, because we are always choosing on behalf of humanity.

Abandonment 🔗

Abandonment – or forlornness – refers to the state of being left entirely without external guidance. Sartre objected to atheistic moralists who, having recognised that God did not exist, simply clung to a secular version of Christian morality without its guarantor. For Sartre, such a move is intellectually dishonest. If God is gone, so is the comfort of divinely grounded values. Humans must decide for themselves – and that is a lonely, irreducible fact.

Despair 🔗

Despair, for Sartre, is not hopelessness – it is the honest recognition that we can only rely on what is within our own will and action. We cannot count on others to follow through on shared projects, because others are equally free and may change their commitments. The only reliable moral agent in your life is you.

Bad faith: fleeing from freedom 🔗

Given how demanding radical freedom is, it should come as no surprise that humans often try to escape it. Sartre calls 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 human beings.

Sartre illustrates this with a famous example: a café waiter whose every gesture is a little too precise, a little too eager – he is not simply doing his job, he is playing the role of waiter, as if his entire being were reducible to the function. Living a life defined entirely by one’s occupation, social class, or racial identity is the very essence of bad faith – a denial of the freedom that makes us human. The waiter is free to leave. He chooses not to, but he pretends this choice has been made for him by circumstance.

Sartre also holds that we are responsible for our very desire to flee responsibility. Even choosing bad faith is a choice. There is no exit from freedom; the only question is whether we acknowledge it honestly or deceive ourselves about it.

Authenticity and the freedom of others 🔗

Authenticity, for Sartre, is the opposite of bad faith. It means acknowledging that you are free, that your situation does not determine you, and that you are the author of the values by which you live. But authenticity is not a purely self-regarding virtue. In Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre argued that to will one’s own freedom requires willing the freedom of others. A person who genuinely affirms their own freedom cannot coherently seek to suppress the freedom of those around them.

This is the ethical heart of existentialist humanism. Freedom is not a licence to do whatever one pleases without regard for others; it is a recognition that every human being shares the same radical openness to self-definition. As the Stanford Encyclopedia notes, existentialist ethics begins from the idea that there is no external moral order, but this does not mean the existentialists were promoting moral nihilism. The task of existence involves acting and doing – realising freedom through projects while taking responsibility for how those projects enhance or diminish freedom for others.

Critiques of Sartre’s freedom-based ethics 🔗

Sartre’s philosophy has faced serious and sustained criticism, and engaging with these critiques is essential to understanding the limits of his approach.

The problem of social constraints 🔗

Critics argue that Sartre’s emphasis on individual freedom and responsibility neglects the social and historical context in which individuals exist. Systems of oppression – racism, poverty, sexism – do not simply influence individuals at the margins; they structurally limit what choices are available and what consequences those choices carry. In his foundational work Being and Nothingness, Sartre contends that humans possess absolute freedom, not determined by external factors – a claim that many find difficult to square with the realities of systemic injustice. To tell someone living under severe structural oppression that they are “absolutely free” risks sounding not just philosophically naive but morally dismissive.

The risk of moral relativism 🔗

Critics questioned whether Sartre’s universalisability argument – that by choosing, one chooses for all of humanity – is a sleight of hand. One swift move takes us from an individual choosing for themselves to making judgments on behalf of the whole of humankind, and this transition is never fully argued. The worry is that without a prior standard, there is no way to distinguish authentic choice from monstrous choice. This problem became acute with the question of whether Heidegger’s “authentic” choice to join the Nazi Party was just as valid as Sartre’s own choice to join the French Resistance – an uncomfortable implication that the purely existentialist position seemed unable to escape.

The psychological burden 🔗

Some philosophers argue that Sartre’s account of anguish, which relies on an almost absolute notion of free will, is too idealistic or even impractical. Not every individual experiences existence as an open field of self-creation. For many people, the weight of survival, care responsibilities, and circumstance does not leave much space for the kind of radical self-examination Sartre demands. Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s long-term intellectual companion, developed a more socially embedded version of existentialist ethics in The Ethics of Ambiguity, which required not just affirming one’s own freedom but active compassion for the freedom of others – a position many find more ethically robust than Sartre’s own.

Why Sartre still matters 🔗

Despite these critiques, Sartre’s existentialist humanism raises questions that do not go away. His insistence that humans cannot hide behind God, nature, social role, or historical circumstance – that we are always choosing, always responsible – is a bracing corrective to moral passivity. Bad faith, as Sartre understood it, is most fundamentally a misrecognition of one’s own freedom, and that misrecognition underlies many of the ways individuals and communities avoid confronting injustice. A philosophy that refuses to let people off the hook, that insists on the irreducible weight of human agency, speaks directly to our contemporary moment – one full of institutional blame-shifting, political disengagement, and the constant temptation to treat one’s own choices as inevitable.

Sartre’s existentialism is not a comfortable ethics. It offers no consolation prizes – no divine plan to fall back on, no natural order to appeal to, no fixed essence to excuse our failures. What it offers instead is the serious claim that human beings are the authors of their own values, and that this authorship carries an enormous moral responsibility – not just to themselves, but to all of humanity.

What do you think? If there is no God and no fixed human nature, can human freedom alone serve as a reliable foundation for ethics – or does morality require some external standard beyond individual choice? And if you genuinely chose your freedom, would you be willing to take full responsibility for every value you live by, knowing that in choosing for yourself, you are also choosing for all of humankind?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/ethics-philosophy/Existentialism
3. https://philosophynow.org/issues/15/A_students_guide_to_Jean-Paul_Sartres_Existentialism_and_Humanism
4. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm
5. https://iep.utm.edu/sartre-ex/
6. https://mbrenndoerfer.com/writing/sartre-existentialism-humanism-freedom-responsibility-guide
7. https://spark.parkland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=mcdonald_award
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_(existentialism)
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness
10. https://reasonandmeaning.com/2017/11/15/ethics-existentialism/
11. https://iep.utm.edu/sartre-p/
12. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
13. https://philonotes.com/2023/04/jean-paul-sartres-existentialism
14. https://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/article/10.11648/j.ijes.20230701.13
15. https://philosophiesoflife.org/jean-paul-sartres-philosophy/