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Chapter 3 – Bad Faith
Values-based law challenges the myth that society's laws, rules and conventions are
anything other than essentially human, values-based constructs. In order to show this
and to develop my theory of values-based law I have made use of seventeenth century
philosophers’ rather bleak portraits of human nature in the absence of law, rules or
conventions; Golding’s equally depressing portrayal of English school boys without the
normal social constraints; and several contemporary illustrations of the same tendency.
I have also drawn on the theoretical perspectives of Kuhn, and Berger and Luckmann,
to demonstrate that we objectify values through normalisation and socialisation
processes in response to the state of nature. However, a deep puzzle remains: why is it
that we do not always recognise that we use methods of objectification?
Man is capable of producing a world that he then experiences as
something other than a human product.
Berger and Luckman 1966, p. 78
This chapter makes use of the philosophy of Sartre and the psychological experiments
of Stanley Milgram to explore this puzzle.
Sartre, existentialism and bad faith – a brief introduction
Jean-Paul Sartre was a twentieth century existentialist French philosopher.
Existentialism takes as its point of departure the concrete individual struggling to
makes sense out of his or her life (Kamber, 2000, p. 5). Sartre provides important clues
about how and why we employ methods of objectification. These ideas, and in
particular his notion of bad faith, are central to this thesis. However, some of Sartre’s
ideas which support the notion of bad faith are unrealistic and logically flawed.
It would be impossible to deal with the intricacies of Sartre’s philosophy within the
confines of this thesis. Instead, I distil some of Sartre’s key ideas and show how they
inform and guide my understanding of values-based law.
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