Ooh, Sartre would disapprove of that

All this existentialism is getting to my head. Seriously. So we are all sitting in ToK; everyone has brought in a source that they think deals with ToK-related issues. (I brought The Truman Show, as a consequence, we're talking about starting up a ToK film club.) Hannah brings in the first source which was a newspaper article about a woman killing her children to make her husband's life a misery. She said this was not logical. (I disagree, but that's something else.) Obviously nobody thought this was a very good idea but it just struck me that Sartre would disagree with us.

He would say that the woman took action to change her life and because she chose to do it, she was acting morally. She didn't talk herself out of it by saying that she couldn't kill them because it wasn't in her nature to be a murderer, she did what she chose to. Interesting, Sartre.

I think where he would have not been so happy is that now she is pleading to not have been in her right mind when she did the thing. This is presumably so she gets let off with a lighter sentence. However, according to fellow ToK-er, Lizzie, she was planning to kill them the day before but she took her children shopping and they had such an nice day she thought it would be a shame to spoil it. So she did it the next day. This sounds like it has been a little exaggerated for the media (another ToK issue in itself) but it would have redeemed her in Sartre's mind. He might have still been a little cross with her for telling people it was unplanned, though.

His theory produces such contradictory results to those we expect from a moral philosophy. He doesn't condemn this woman for killing her children and even thinks it is better that she planned it beforehand. Whenever I begin to think that there might be something to his ideas, a practical situation like this comes along and makes it sound so plainly 'wrong' in the normal view of things that I go back to thinking he was a bit mad.

But most philosophers are, if I'm honest.