The title of the present study represents a philosophical wager. After all, Sartre never produced a completed ethical system even though his entire work is shot through with the ethical problematic. It will consequently be necessary for this study to account for the insistent recurrence of the moral question in Sartre's works as well as for the reasons why he was never willing to answer this question in any definitive manner.

To be sure, Sartre did, in fact, write on ethical questions. His Notebooks for an Ethic (1947) are subsequent to Being and Nothingness (1943); two other texts (1964 and 1965) are subsequent to the Critique of Dialectical Reason (i960). The first of these are notes for lectures given by Sartre at the Gramsci Institute in Rome (1964); the second (1965) are notes intended for a lecture at Cornell University canceled at the last moment by Sartre in protest against American bombings in Vietnam. The Notebooks for an Ethic, published posthumously in 1983, are a collection of fragmentary comments or aphorisms without any single emphasis. The two other texts (1964 and 1965) remain unpublished. I shall refer to these latter works as The Rome Lectures and The Cornell Notes. These are coherent texts that set forth fully developed lines of reasoning. Moreover all three of these texts have in common the fact that they were never published by Sartre and consequently, in Sartre's eyes, offered no satisfactory philosophical solution to the ethical question.