When existential philosophy first became widely known in the years after the Second World War, it was understood to be a radically individualistic philosophy. It is not hard to see why this was so. For these philosophers, every aspect of human life was to be understood in terms of the concept of choice; and choice was held to be in every case the choice of an individual human being, however we might try to conceal this fact from ourselves. Such choices were declared to be ultimately arbitrary and unjustifiable by the procedures of reason. If there was any virtue that survived the wreck of all traditional conceptions of moral truth and validity, it was the ability to accept this grim fact and live “authentically” with it. This meant living in a way that did not invoke any authority for one's own actions that was inconsistent with these underlying assumptions.

In the version of these ideas that we owe to Jean-Paul Sartre, this individualistic theme was taken as far as it could logically go. The same holds true for any implications it might be supposed to have for the ethical character of our relations with other human beings. According to Sartre, these relations could only be one form or another of domination; as he put it, they would unavoidably be either sadistic or masochistic.