This either calls into question 'modern standards' or the interpretation of their actions, from my point of view. They were certainly no saints, but to a couple

This either calls into question 'modern standards' or the interpretation of their actions, from my point of view. They were certainly no saints, but to a couple whose writings ranged from anti-statism, skepticism of morality, and (proto-sex-positive) feminism, I'm not too keen to call them hypocritical, despite that. The intellectual dissonance is not uncommon among philosophers, who generally cannot be expected to behave any more ethically than the rest of us. Unlike moral philosophers and Spinoza, however, de Beauvoir never claimed to be fighting the moral realist's crusade - and after Nietzche, I can't blame her a bit. But to a person like Sartre who subscribes to the maxim that 'morality [...] is but a bourgeois pretension" in the words of one of his intellectual sources, I find more sympathy for him than the grave crime of.. grooming adult students and the ambitions of a New Yorker journalist feeling like he's blowing the lid of the sordid lives of the philosophers. By these words we hang de Beauvoir in a weird game of cancel culture to own the literati because we clicked on an article from 2005 in an American paper.