Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity contains an interlude about children’s moral development that sheds light on her argument that ethics lie in choosing freedom despite the unavoidable ambiguity of existence. Beauvoir’s ethics reject God or secular humanism. Like her fellow existentialists, there is no external moral imperative. Freedom highlights the self as a negativity, opening the possibility for self-creation. Morality, according to Beauvoir, has something to do with the spontaneous upsurge of movement (through ambiguity) towards this self-creation.
But during childhood, we are not provided with the same opportunities for moral freedom. For Beauvoir, childhood is a “situation” in which we are “cast into a universe” that we did not “establish” (37). This world which we did not create is a “serious world” since it is filled with things and values that pre-date us (37). In this situation, children are “allowed to play” because the significance of their actions—their existential responsibility to mankind—is not yet apparent. Children, according to Beauvoir, escape “the anguish of freedom” because everything is “given” to them by adults (39). By defining childhood as outside moral freedom, Beauvoir elucidates her precise meaning when she talks about our adult dilemmas. We are not free to play as children because we recognize that the world is not given and that it is our responsibility to make meaning. We project ourselves towards our future selves, unlike the child who is “incapable of recognizing himself in the past or seeing himself in the future” (27). Because our childhood is, in Beauvoir’s words, “meta-physically privileged,” we are apt to wax nostalgic for this serene past (39).
Childhood is not so serene in St. Augustine’s Confessions. St. Augustine, the Christian Saint, is a far cry from the secular Beauvoir, but a comparative examination of their accounts of childhood seems to reveal something interesting about Beauvoir’s morality. St Augustine begins Confessions with a vivid description of infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Crucially, this is a childhood before God. Augustine starts by attributing the world to God; he writes, “Therefore I would not exist–I would simply not be at all– unless I exist in thee, from whom and by whom and in whom all things are” (I.2). Here is one initial similarity with Beauvoir: as children, we are born into established relations and standards. One of them, as demonstrated above, is God.1 But Augustine also describes “customs in the midst of which [he] was cast” (I.30). God is the ultimate moral standard, but children are also projected into an “arena” of rules to which they are held, despite lacking the moral justification for such rules. This sounds similar to Beauvoir, inasmuch as adults punish children against unintelligible standards (which produces a defined sense of good and evil), but Beauvoir argues that children are unbothered by their transgressions. They are “in a state of security by virtue of [their] very insignificance” (39). Augustine remembers childhood differently. A rowdy, disobedient child, Augustine recalls receiving punishments. He recalls his “miseries and mockeries” at the hands of teachers who held him to standards he had yet to understand (I.14). This tormented Augustine and encouraged his turn toward God as a being who “was able to hear and help us” (I.14). Beauvoir’s assessment that children are rather satisfied to be punished against rules they don’t understand seems less phenomenologically accurate than Augustine’s story. The basis for her argument that children don’t deal with existential ethics is that they aren’t pushed to evaluate their punishments. Augustine, on the other hand, sharpens his ethics in the face of such tormenting punishments. When children respond “That’s not fair!” to punishments, they are in the process of forming ethics. For St. Augustine, this is religious.
1 The difference with God as the “ready-made” standard is that the child can’t necessarily come into a world without God as they age. If the child attributes certain things (ethics, rules, values) to God, they won’t experience the discovery that they are responsible for the creation of these things.
