The burning question guiding this study is presented as a variation of a question posed by Karl Jaspers, an existential philosopher who questioned the collective guilt of the German nation for the Hitlerian disaster. According to Jaspers, “there is a line at which even the possibility of moral judgment ceases. It can be drawn where we feel the other not even trying for a moral self-analysis … where he seems not to hear [conscience] at all.” Carefully examining the perverse implications of Jaspers’ argument to warn readers about the messy business of ethics pervading this study, the author argues that if Jaspers’ reasoning holds, some victims of atrocity could be conceived as morally guilty, while perpetrators of atrocity could be conceived as free of moral guilt! Making a fine point about messy ethics finer, the author reveals the dangerous way the former captive and French existential philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, entertained an allegedly authentic existential ethic that would achieve a synthesis of good and evil, thereby not alienating humankind from itself. After exposing the naturalistic fallacy resident in Sartre’s proposal, the author allows that Jaspers redeemed himself by means of an ethic of survival that teaches, contra Kant, that “morally we have … the … duty, … to save ourselves for realizations in the world.”