Beauvoir later disavowed her own ethics of ambiguity for Marxist reasons

Evidence

Beauvoir’s brief sketch of these ideas in The Ethics of Ambiguity is one of the most interesting attempts I’ve read at describing the bizarre mixture of improbabilities that human beings are. It is here that she laid out the first foundations of The Second Sex and of her entire novelistic vision of life. Yet, disappointingly, she repudiated parts of The Ethics of Ambiguity later because it did not fit with her Marxist social theory. ‘I was in error when I thought I could define a morality independent of social context’, she wrote meekly. But perhaps we need not follow her in this. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 720

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: which specific parts of The Ethics of Ambiguity did Beauvoir repudiate, and what changed in her thinking between 1947 and her Marxist-aligned phase?
• XREF: connects to: Beauvoir later judged her early ethics too individualistic and abstract — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 479; Beauvoir shifted bad faith from individual psychoanalysis to collective politics — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 64; Beauvoir located an irreducible ambiguity at the heart of the human condition — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 877

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir later judged her early ethics too individualistic and abstract #expands (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 479
• Beauvoir shifted bad faith from individual psychoanalysis to collective politics #expands (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 64