JEAN-PAUL SARTRE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF VIRTUES - Two Conclusions from One Primitive: A Criterion-Fixed Adjudication inside a Shared Axiom

Abstract Sartre is better where the question is what freedom is like; the Programme (Philosophy of Virtues Research Programme) is better where the question is what freedom does and what happens when it is taken. The Philosophy of Virtues and Sartrean existentialism take the same primitive. Both make freedom the ground rather than a means, both refuse to derive value from antecedent essence or from outcomes, and both hold that what an act is depends on whether it issues from the agent. They then reach opposite conclusions about coercion. Sartre wrote that the French were never more free than under the German occupation; the Inversion Theorem holds that a virtue whose freedom is replaced does not diminish but inverts. If Sartre is right, the theorem has no object. This paper adjudicates the pair from inside the shared premise, with tests fixed before verdicts. Four results are established. T1 withdraws the programme’s own prior characterisation of Sartre: his freedom is sourcehood freedom, not leeway freedom, he does not argue from alternative possibilities, and he would accept the Frankfurt reply — which makes him the nearest predecessor on the substrate question rather than a distant neighbour. T2 shows that the Deprivation Operator does not require the removing power to be external, so that self-inflicted inversion is already admissible within the formalism; Sartre’s mauvaise foi is its phenomenology, and the Inversion Theorem is therefore not exclusively a theory of tyranny. T3 dissolves the Occupation remark by the operator’s three-place structure: Sartre predicates freedom of the choice, which survives, while the theorem predicates inversion of the virtue-object, whose discipline has been transferred; both hold, of different objects. T4 states the Regard Dilemma: the Look either leaves the Other’s freedom intact, in which case it does not threaten the Valence Theorem, or it diminishes that freedom, in which case freedom is gradable and diminishable by external agency, which is the premise the Inversion Theorem requires and Sartre denies. Sartre cannot press the objection without surrendering what made it his. Two debts are recorded. Beauvoir argued in 1947, from inside the same ontology, that willing oneself free requires willing others free; the reconciliation is not new to existentialism and priority is hers. What T4 adds is of a different kind — her argument is normative and persuades a Sartrean willing to be persuaded, while the dilemma is dialectical and constrains one who is not. And the paper does not establish that the Look leaves autonomy intact, only freedom. The intersubjective determinants of A are unmodelled in the corpus, and that gap is recorded as the strongest surviving objection. Keywords: Sartre; freedom; sourcehood; bad faith; the Look; coercion; virtue; practico-inert; Beauvoir; existentialism Summary Verdict For phenomenological description: Sartre ranks higher, and not narrowly. Nothing in the corpus approaches his account of what bad faith is like from inside — the waiter, the flight into facticity, anguish as the reflective apprehension of one's own groundlessness. The Philosophy of Virtues can represent the endogenous case; it cannot describe it. T2's identification of mauvaise foi with the operator's internal case is the programme borrowing a description it could not have produced. For the axis of freedom: a concordance, not a ranking. T1 places both systems on sourcehood, and the placement corrects the programme's own published error. Neither wins here. What changes is the burden: the cheapest distinction is gone, and the programme now owes an argument for why a substrate with domains and degrees is preferable to one without. The paper states the obligation and discharges it nowhere. For coercion: the Philosophy of Virtues ranks higher, decisively. Sartre's account has a single object — the choice — and therefore cannot say what is wrong with a confession under torture beyond noting that the prisoner still chose. The three-place operator gives two objects and says both things at once: the choice was free, the confession is not honesty. T3 dissolves the strongest apparent contradiction between the systems, and it does so with machinery written before the objection was raised. For the Other: the Philosophy of Virtues survives, and survives without solving. T4 does not answer the Look; it prices the objection. Either it leaves freedom intact, in which case it misses the Valence Theorem's variable, or it reduces freedom, in which case Sartre concedes gradability. That is enough to clear the reef on which his ethics stopped twice, and it is not the same as charting it. For value: Sartre ranks higher on present evidence, and the paper concedes it. He holds that values have no ground but projection, and that a catalogue of virtues with determinate domains is the spirit of seriousness in its purest form. The programme's reply is the transcendental argument from deprivation, which he would classify as one more flight from groundlessness. This paper does not adjudicate that, and until it is adjudicated the strongest philosophical objection to the framework belongs to Sartre. For systemic application: the Philosophy of Virtues ranks higher, with a stated exception. It formalises what Sartre only described, extends to institutions, generates a registered falsifier, and turns bad faith from a portrait into a case of a general operator. The exception is autonomy: Sartre's Look reaches the framework through A, where nothing blocks it, and the corpus has no intersubjective term. Amendment III declares the gap. §9 records it as the strongest surviving objection. Overall. Sartre is better where the question is what freedom is like; the programme is better where the question is what freedom does and what happens when it is taken. The two failures are asymmetric in a way worth naming: his ethics stopped because unconditioned freedom generates no criterion, and the programme's exposure is that a criterion without an intersubjective term protects the wrong variable. His is a structural limit. The programme's is unfinished work. Highlights · The programme’s published characterisation of Sartre as “leeway-maximal and contentless” is withdrawn; the correction is stated as a formal result rather than an erratum. · The Deprivation Operator admits an internal removing power, so mauvaise foi falls under the Inversion Theorem without new apparatus. · The Occupation remark and sgn(F) = −1 are shown jointly consistent, of different objects. · T4 puts the Look in a dilemma whose second horn concedes the premise of the Dynamic Freedom Theorem. · Sartre’s practico-inert is adopted as a descriptive genealogy of structural resistance, which the corpus’s own audit records as established historically rather than derived. · Beauvoir’s priority on reciprocal freedom is acknowledged; the Valence Theorem’s central intuition is not original to this programme. Relevance A research programme that makes freedom its primitive owes an account of the only other system in the tradition that did the same and went further with it. Sartre’s ethics was abandoned twice — the Notebooks unfinished, the second volume of the Critique unfinished — and both abandonments happened at the same place. Establishing what that place is, and whether a structural framework passes it, tests the present programme’s foundation rather than its conclusions.