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emain unanswered and important aspects of bad faith have not yet been considered.
For instance, I have not yet considered instruments of bad faith other than Sartre’s role
adoption and Milgram’s agentic state. Are there other instruments of bad faith? If so
what are they? And is bad faith always active, or can it also be passive?
I now adapt and develop Sartre’s notion of bad faith to create a thorough, robust
framework with which to examine best interest determinations. I start by suggesting
key components of a workable theory and propose a working definition of bad faith. I
test and develop the theory using four examples.
Values-based law interpretation of bad faith
Sartre starts from the position that we all have complete freedom and choice and that
consciousness is nothingness. Our reaction to this freedom and nothingness is nausea
and anguish which we respond to with bad faith. My interpretation starts from the basic
premise that we employ bad faith as a mechanism to cope with the reality and the
complexity of different situations that confront us daily.
Every minute of every day we employ our values to guide and inform our decisions.
But sometimes, particularly if a situation is especially foreign or difficult, we do not
always know how to respond. So we employ mechanisms to help us cope. One of these
mechanisms is objectification. We objectify ourselves, the people round us, the laws,
rules and conventions that govern our behaviours and so on. This creates a perceived
distance between our subjective selves and the situation we are dealing with. We then
feel better able to cope. If we do this with the intention of deceiving ourselves about the
reality of our situation or to deny our subjectivity then we are in bad faith.
Promoting the use of objectification is the common perception that values somehow
cloud our judgement. In chapter one, I considered how Cartesian duality separates the
mind from the body and empirical and rational epistemologies portray value-free
reasoning as not only possible, but preferable. These philosophical traditions propagate
the deception that we can make decisions independently of our subjective self. As a
result, we not only use bad faith existentially to deal with the situations we meet in our
day to day lives. Using methods of objectification with the express intention of denying
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