Summary: Existentialism Is a Humanism (page 2)

There is no God, and therefore no values that are inherently superior to others. There are only values that we choose—or fail to choose—and we must bear the consequences of those choices.

We cannot escape this, for if I refuse to choose, I am still making a choice ¹.

At first glance, this might suggest that we cannot judge others or determine whether one project is better than another.

Yet, according to Sartre, we can. Certainly, whenever a person chooses their commitment and their project with complete sincerity and lucidity—whatever that project may be—it is impossible to claim that another should be preferred ². We can still, however, judge and condemn certain projects—not on the basis of a value judgement, but a logical one: Some choices are grounded in error, while others are grounded in truth ³.

Most importantly, some projects are not sincere but rest on what Sartre calls bad faith ⁴. Anyone who reaches for an excuse—who invents a form of determinism ("It's not me, it's society," or "It's my unconscious," and so on)—is acting in bad faith, and can be condemned accordingly: not as a moral judgement, but as a logical one. To believe in an excuse is a fundamental error.

It is also possible, finally, to make a genuinely moral judgement on certain projects.

For Sartre, freedom can have no other aim than to will itself:

The acts of men of good faith have as their ultimate meaning the pursuit of freedom as such ⁵.

We may therefore condemn the project of anyone who builds their life on the denial of their own freedom, or who seeks to suppress it.

Furthermore, in willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others ⁶. It follows that we can equally condemn the project of anyone who seeks to suppress the freedom of others: I can only take my freedom as my aim if I also take the freedom of others as my aim ⁷.

Or, on the plane of absolute authenticity [...] I can only will the freedom of others ⁸. It is on this basis that one can, as an existentialist, condemn Nazism.

Sartre calls "cowards" those who conceal their own freedom from themselves through excuses, and "bastards" those who attempt to justify the necessity of their existence.

These judgements, however, are made solely in terms of strict authenticity ⁹.

One might object to Sartre: At bottom, values are not serious, since you choose them ¹⁰. To which he replies: If God does not exist, somebody has to invent values ¹¹.

¹ p.63
² p.67
³ p.68
⁴ ibid.
⁵ p.69
⁶ ibid.
⁷ p.70
⁸ ibid.
⁹ p.71
¹⁰ p.73
¹¹ ibid.