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Based on Sartre's argument that there is no fixed morality to determine action, he believes that humans have radical freedom. This means that people have the absolute power to choose how they will act in any given situation and in their lives as a whole.
Human freedom is a concept that recognizes the dignity of individuals and is defined as negative liberty or the absence of coercive constraint.
Tomorrow morning, anyone could choose to become a vegan or take up snowboarding, quit school to become a farmer, or go on a crime spree. These choices are not individual in the sense that they don’t affect other people, but rather in the sense that nobody else can override one’s own conscience.
In fact, it is precisely because of this radical freedom that people are wholly responsible for the choices they make and for the people they become, even if their control over their choices does not imply control over every outcome.
Since nothing outside a person forces them to act in any particular way, people are completely responsible for the outcomes of their actions (although not for the circumstances in which they act, unless those are circumstances are of their own making). This radical freedom has both positive and negative components.
The positive component is that people get to decide how they want to live; the negative component is that people are always forced to make some decision—even if that’s the decision to do nothing—and take responsibility for it.
This is why Sartre argues that people are “condemned to be free;” the one thing nobody can choose is to not have choices. Anguish, as Sartre defines it, is the feeling of moral responsibility that accompanies the necessity to choose and the recognition that one will never receive a final judgment about the correctness of one’s choice.
Whereas Sartre’s critics argue that existentialism causes anguish, he replies that anguish is an inescapable fact of life. Turning away from anguish, according to Sartre, does not mean overcoming it, but rather hiding from it in bad faith: it means choosing to do nothing and pretending one is not morally responsible for oneself.
In Sartre’s mind, people’s choices are all that matter: what a person chooses to do makes up the entirety of their life, character, and essence. Mere beliefs do not matter because all beliefs are either expressed in action or bad faith. Unfulfilled plans and fantasies, likewise, do not matter because they never come to fruition.
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