Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Ethics of Ambiguity is a 1947 philosophical work by Simone de Beauvoir that argues for an existentialist ethics grounded in human freedom and responsibility. Beauvoir contends that because no values exist independently of human choice, people are fully accountable for the values they create and must act in ways that preserve the freedom of others, not only themselves.
The Ethics of Ambiguity was published as a book in November 1947, after appearing as three installments in Les Temps modernes. It was prompted by a lecture Beauvoir gave in 1945, in which she claimed it was impossible to base an ethical system on Sartre's Being and Nothingness; she then wrote the book over six months to take on that challenge herself.
Bernard Frechtman translated The Ethics of Ambiguity into English. The translation was published in 1948 by Philosophical Library and remains the standard English edition. Scholar Emily Anne Parker has argued that Frechtman's translation obscures Beauvoir's use of the French term singularité by rendering it inconsistently across the text.
In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir distinguishes ontological freedom, the basic human capacity to choose that belongs to every conscious being, from ethical freedom, which requires actively taking up that capacity through commitment and action directed toward preserving freedom in others as well as oneself. Ethical freedom is a continuous process, not a given condition.
Beauvoir identifies several attitudes in The Ethics of Ambiguity: the sub-man, who avoids freedom through apathy; the serious man, who hides behind fixed values treated as absolute; the nihilist, who rejects all value after the collapse of inherited certainties; the adventurer, who acts without regard for others; and the passionate man, who subordinates other people to his desired object. Genuine freedom requires willing the freedom of others, not only oneself.
Beauvoir argues in The Ethics of Ambiguity that violence may sometimes be necessary in struggles against oppression but is never morally neutral. She criticizes justifying present violence by appealing to a fixed or guaranteed future outcome, because the future has meaning only through human projects and present suffering cannot be dismissed as the mere cost of an inevitable goal.