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anguish, but instead embraces and rejoices in his subjectivity and freedom to choose.
His intention is to do a job which he enjoys and for which he is rewarded with money,
job satisfaction and interaction with the customers.
If bad faith is about self-deception and denying our subjectivity, then good faith must
be about honesty, recognising our subjective selves, exercising our freedom to choose
and taking responsibility for our choices. Whether we act in good faith or not depends
on how we reason individually and make decisions about our actions.
Consider again James from chapter two, who worked in the supermarket and was
considering whether to follow the rule which stopped him from wearing a ring through
his chin. In the same way that the supermarket building or the uniform he wore was part
of his objective reality, so too were the rules. But James did not simply find refuge in
the rules which governed his situation, or the identity he had adopted as a supermarket
worker. James was not denying the reality of his subjective self to make a decision in
that situation. The rules prompted him to think about his action of wearing the ring both
inside and outside of the supermarket environment and thus to make sense of his
actions within different contexts. James did not make his decision in bad faith. He was
not simply following the orders issued by the supermarket. He contemplated all his
options and chose to follow the rules and not wear the ring through his chin.
Was Sartre really saying that self-deception can be so complete that good faith ceases
to be a possibility? His thesis again takes us to a seemingly illogical position, yet which
conveys an important aspect of how we behave in relation to bad faith. This is because
logic can never fully capture the complexity of human existence. There does seem to be
situations where we are so immersed in bad faith that we may not recognise what we
are doing. Warnock explains this in terms of levels of bad faith (p. 117). At the
superficial level, for example, we use self-deception to justify an extravagance which
we do not really need on the grounds that it is in a sale, or that it will be more expensive
next year.
At another level, people do not appear to be knowingly trying to be something they are
not. “But nevertheless one feels about these people that they are always seeing
themselves as such and such – a member of some social group, an intellectual, a
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