Sartre’s least-favoured principle faces problems of identifying who qualifies

Evidence

No one could say that this is easy to do, and not only because (as Beauvoir had pointed out in The Second Sex) borrowing someone else’s perspective puts a strain on the psyche. Anyone who tries to do it also runs into a mass of logical and conceptual problems. Disagreements inevitably ensue about who exactly is least favoured at any moment. Each time an underdog becomes an overdog, everything has to be recalculated. Constant monitoring of roles is required — and who is to do the monitoring? — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 859

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘who monitors the monitors’ problem parallels the hierarchy-of-trust regression noted in The Social Control of Impersonal Trust. — connects to: Sartre’s least-favoured principle delegitimizes elite rationalizations of inequality — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 858; Sartre proposed the least favoured as the criterion for truth — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 857; Beauvoir’s ontological freedom position may not depart significantly from Sartre’s — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 212

Broader Connections

• Sartre proposed the least favoured as the criterion for truth #responds-to (0.95) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 857
• Beauvoir’s ontological freedom position may not depart significantly from Sartre’s #complicates (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 212