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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 2, Personal Freedom and Others.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Beauvoir accuse Marxists of accepting moral superiority?
(a) When Marxists find fault with their adversaries and charge them with cowardice, lying, selfishness, and venality.
(b) By being suspicious of any bourgeois revolution.
(c) By morally condemning any member of the proletariat who does not participate in revolution.
(d) By considering any movement in which a Marxist is involved to be part of the revolution of the proletariat.

2. What does Beauvoir claim to be the relationship between the serious and nihilism?
(a) Seriousness and nihilism both develop a narrow set of ethics based upon a relationship to achievement or lack of the same.
(b) The serious man often rallies to a partial nihilism, denying everything which is not its object.
(c) Seriousness and nihilism focus on goals or the impossibility of reaching them to avoid accepting the freedom of ambiguity.
(d) The serious man and nihilists dispute the purpose of those who do not support their goals.

3. What does Descartes credit man's unhappiness to, according to Beauvoir?
(a) The inner conflict between doing right and doing what he wants.
(b) Having first been a child.
(c) His inability to accept his ambiguity.
(d) His lack of freedom.

4. How does Beauvoir explain that the Marxist paradox lends to her theory the scheme of man is ambiguous?
(a) She agrees that, "One even the most devoted proletariat has what he needs, he begins feeding his desires."
(b) She shows that, "Morality is based on denial, while work and labor is based upon acquisition."
(c) She points out that , "He wants to be, and to the extent that the coincides with this wish, he fails."
(d) She suggests that, although, "Marxists deride traditional moral codes that forbid theft and adultery as being 'bourgeois', she points out that strict adherence to Marxist dogma is a moral imperative for revolution."

5. What irony does Beauvoir suggest contributes to the most optimistic ethics.
(a) That although ethics are pursued to define man's existence, they always lead to ambiguity.
(b) That they have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man.
(c) That all ethics eventually lead man to rationalize violations of their ethics.
(d) That although they seek to lift man to utopia, the eventually lead man to distopia.

Short Answer Questions

1. To what conclusion to Beauvoir arrive regarding Sartre's internal choices that are affected by personal passions?

2. How does Beauvoir compare southern slaves to children?

3. During their stage of freedom, how does Beauvoir claim that a child sees adults?

4. What role does time play what Beauvoir identifies as the ability to will oneself free?

5. What relationship does Beauvoir identify between ethics and facticity?

(see the answer key)

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