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is both ‘Other’ and ‘other’. Here there appears to be a literal conflation of the meaning of
moral agency and judgement and the meaning of violence. However, a closer consideration
of Beauvoir’s argument and of her discussion of moral subjectivity in Ethic of Ambiguity
suggests a more complex reading. In order to establish this more complex account, it is
helpful to separate out the two modes through which subjectivity is asserted in Beauvoir’s
account, in relation to ‘Other’ and in relation to ‘other’.
A careful reading of the context of the passage quoted above makes clear that Beauvoir’s
reference to ‘killing’ does not imply the association between subjectivity and violence of
which she has been accused. As Chanter has pointed out, Beauvoir is here discussing the
relation and distinction between subject and ‘Other’, or to put it in more familiar terms,
between culture and nature – she is not dealing directly with the relation between self and
other, though she is arguing that there are implications for relations between men and
women that follow from her account (Chanter, 1995). Certainly, there is violence in
Beauvoir’s relating of man as inventor (‘the stick and the club with which he armed himself
to knock down fruits and to slaughter animals became instruments for enlarging his grasp
upon the world’ TSS: 95). She uses the language of ‘conquest’ and it is clear that man is
only able to emerge as different from animal, because he self-consciously sets about
enabling his own survival by refashioning the world in a variety of ways to make it serve
his purposes, a process which sets off the possibility of going beyond survival as the goal
of action. Moreover, it is clear that Beauvoir sees this as something that is more associated
with men in nomadic culture than women. However, it is not men’s capacity to make and
use tools, or their capacity to kill animals which is central to what gives them ‘supreme
dignity’, it is the deliberate, and Beauvoir suggests strictly speaking unnecessary, risking of
their lives for some other purpose (‘the prestige of the horde’). Animals run all kinds of
Convention