ABSTRACT
It is inarguable that Jean-Paul Sartre’s vast literary output, including his philosophical novels, plays, short stories, and existential biographies, are fraught with morally charged issues. Indeed, we might well say that the question concerning “the moral,” or “une morale,” was for Sartre the central question of the twentieth century. It is curiously ironic, then, that given his preoccupation with moral questions, Sartre never completed his promised work on ethics, as he stated in Being and Nothingness. It would be an ethics based on the phenomenological ontology he presented in this work, as Sartre notes in his concluding remarks:
In particular will freedom by taking itself for an end escape all situation? Or on the contrary, will it remain situated? Or will it situate itself so much more precisely and the more individually as it projects itself further in anguish as a conditioned freedom and accepts more fully its responsibility as an existent by whom the world comes into being? All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not an accessory reflection, can find their reply only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them a future work.
(Sartre 1956: 628)