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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What prevents a moral question from presenting itself to the child according to Beauvoir?
(a) The misunderstanding of spontaneity and affects.
(b) Ignorance of consequences.
(c) Ignorance of the physical world.
(d) A lack of perspective to see himself in the past or seeing himself in the future.

2. How does Beauvoir claim that the child develops the conviction of good and evil?
(a) Through pain and healing.
(b) Through joy and disappointment.
(c) Through observation and learning.
(d) Through punishments, prizes, words of praise or blame.

3. Although Beauvoir reports that existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity, what does she claim to be existentialism's fundamental flaw?
(a) Its true ambiguity is superficial since it has no moral code.
(b) It is incapable of furnishing any principle for making choices.
(c) Existentialism is essentially taken by individuals seeking to pursue what is normally antisocial and contributes to the violence of mastery of nature.
(d) It is so deeply ambiguous that its true understanding cannot be achieved.

4. What does Beauvoir report to be the child's situation?
(a) He faces the reality that his freedom is continually reduced by his growing knowledge.
(b) His ambiguity is compounded by his ignorance of right and wrong.
(c) He is subject to accept all things based upon what others tell him.
(d) He is cast into a universe which he has not helped to establish and appears as an absolute to which he can only submit.

5. How does Beauvoir explain how the passionate man different from the adventurer man?
(a) The passionate man acts from internal desires.
(b) The passionate man has a focus guiding his adventures.
(c) The passionate man attaches his adventure to unmovable ethics.
(d) The passionate man fails to fulfill his subjectivity rather than the content of the subjectivity.

6. Upon what does Beauvoir claim that a child's freedom is based?
(a) Upon his willingness to trust adults without question.
(b) Upon adults whom he is only to respect and obey.
(c) Upon his inability to grasp the concept of cause and effect.
(d) Upon ignorance that makes all his decisions meaningless.

7. 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.

8. How does Beauvoir define materialist philosophers?
(a) Those who "conceive all matter as eternal".
(b) Those who "see no life after this one".
(c) Those who have "striven to reduce mind to matter".
(d) Those who see "no value in thought".

9. What does Beauvoir report comes to the individual at the time the world changes in his perspective?
(a) He faces the choice of repeating past mistakes or breaking from them.
(b) The world is no longer ready made.
(c) He can begin to control the consequences of his acts.
(d) He has the moment of moral choice.

10. What is a principle that Beauvoir states that an ethics of ambiguity will refuse to deny a priori?
(a) That "ethics of ambiguity" are as solipsistic as is existentialism.
(b) That the most important element of "ethics of ambiguity" is to disallow them from defining the conduct of those outside their understanding.
(c) That, by definition, "ethics of ambiguity" must remained undefined.
(d) That separate existants can be bound to each other, such as individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all.

11. What does Beauvoir suggest becomes the intellectual responsibility of existentialists who reject God?
(a) He bears responsibility for a world which is not the work of strange power.
(b) He bears the responsibility to show his works for self-benefit do not affect others in his environs.
(c) He has the responsibility of defining how works for self-benefit are also beneficial to his environs.
(d) He bears the responsibility to prove the lives of others have not affects on himself, starting with the union of his parents that brought his existence.

12. How does Beauvoir characterize the fate of the "sub-man"?
(a) He does not recognize his facticity, therefore he does not experience the triumph of freedom through the development of his ethics.
(b) He makes his way across a world deprived of meaning toward a death which merely confirm his long negation of himself.
(c) He finds nothing to appreciate and in turn no one appreciates him.
(d) His ethics and facticity have no consequences, therefore they are nonexistent.

13. How does Beauvoir claim that Marxists consider man's actions to be valid?
(a) Only if the man has not helped initiate his action by an internal movement or through free will.
(b) Only if the actions support the revolution of the proletariat.
(c) Only if the actions are in opposition of the bourgeois.
(d) Only if the actions eliminate private property.

14. How does Beauvoir claim the condition of the world changes from child to adolescence?
(a) The world is no longer ready made, but must be made.
(b) The individual begins to realize that matter has significant influence on thought.
(c) When a child begins to realize he cannot create his own existence, he becomes accountable for his thoughts.
(d) The adolescent realizes his decisions have affects.

15. How does Beauvoir explain that the serious man becomes a dangerous tyrant?
(a) His ultimate goal is always to exert power over other people and usurp their freedom to his purposes.
(b) His choice to reject the ambiguity of his freedom combined with the desire to achieve his goal drives him to subject those in his environment to nothing more than instruments of achievement.
(c) The consequences of his choices to devote himself to his goal requires that he direct the choices of those around him.
(d) He ignores the subjectivity of his choice and sacrifices the freedom of others to achieve his goals.

Short Answer Questions

1. According to Beauvoir, what is the goal of dualist teachings to their disciples?

2. How does Beauvoir define the relationship of the "sub-man" to ethics and facticity?

3. How does Beauvoir compare southern slaves to children?

4. In the face of emerging violence of man's growing mastery of the world, what does Beauvoir suggest to individuals who seek to navigate it?

5. What does Beauvoir state is the goal at which her freedom aims?

(see the answer keys)

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