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Lesson · 4 min Gentle

Bad Faith

In one line Saying “people in my place just do this” can hide a choice.

Bad faith is Sartre’s term, and Beauvoir took it up: the pretense that you are a finished thing. “People in my place just do this” can be a way of hiding a choice that was still open. Pretending you had no choice is itself a choice.

A role is lived, not issued at birth. You can inhabit a job, a family part, or a custom honestly. The failure is treating the role as a fact that replaced you, so the deed was never yours to own.

A real limit can still be named. A locked door, a law, a body, a promise already made: those are real. Bad faith is the limit you invent, or the type you hide inside, so the act arrives with no author.

Go deeper

Sartre’s examples include a waiter whose movements are a little too precise, as if he were playing a waiter instead of being one. Bad faith is lying to oneself about one’s freedom by hiding behind a role or a fate.

Beauvoir applied the idea to social pressures, noting that people are sometimes pushed into roles, so that blame for bad faith has to be weighed against what freedom was available.

The job that decided

Illustration: The job that decided

A clerk takes a cruel shortcut and says people in that job just do it. They could have refused the shortcut. The title did not take the step.

Beauvoir would call the sentence a flight. The role is something they are living. It was not a nature that issued the act.

Try this today Catch one “I had no choice” today and ask what was really still open.

Question 1 of 2

A clerk takes a cruel shortcut and says people in that job just do it. They could have refused.

How is that sentence being used?

Question 2 of 2

A door is locked from the outside. They say they could not leave, and the door really would not open.

Is saying so bad faith?

Cite or share this lesson

A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:

Quest2Reason. “Bad Faith.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/lesson/bad-faith. Accessed 13 November 2026.

Sources
  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Jean-Paul Sartre” — Sartre’s account of bad faith, which Beauvoir builds on.
  • Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) — Bad faith is fleeing the freedom you still have by pretending you are a finished thing.
  • Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949) — A social role is taken up in a life. It is not a nature handed out at birth.