Yes it’s possible to be more specific than “good faith” / “bad faith” but that doesn’t mean those phrases aren’t communicating something substantive and useful, right? By the same token, every possible word and phrase and sentence could be elaborated into something more specific.
I also agree that there are edge cases, but again, that’s a near-universal property of using language to communicate.
Here’s my defense of good faith / bad faith.
STEP 1: Conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motives are not the only kind of motive, let alone the only influence on behavior, but they are a motive and an influence on behavior, and a particularly important one for many purposes.
For example, if I have a conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motive to murder you but find myself with cold feet, that’s a different situation than if I have a conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motive to not murder you but have anger and poor self-control. You very much care which one it is, when deciding what to say to me, guessing what’s gonna happen in the future, etc., even though both situations could be described as “you have some sources of desire to murder me and other sources of desire to not murder me”. That’s why we have terms like “self-control” and “self-awareness” that are relevant to how strongly one’s conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motives determine behavior. It’s a common thing to be thinking about.
STEP 2: Conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motives can vary continuously along many dimensions, but “good-faith” / “bad-faith” tends to label two opposite ends of one important such dimension of variation, in a generally pretty clear way (in context). As in the fallacy of gray, the existence of a spectrum does not reduce the usefulness of labeling its opposite ends.
Do you ever get accused of bad faith? How do you respond?
I can’t immediately recall any specific examples from my own life.
I would probably explicitly spell out what I interpret the accusation of bad faith to mean, and then say that this accusation is not true (if it isn’t). For example, if I wrote a critical book review, and someone said I was criticizing the book in bad faith, maybe I would say “I understand your comment to be something like: You think I set out with an explicit goal to do a hit job on this book, because I’m opposed to its conclusions, and I am just saying whatever will make the book look bad without regard to being fair and honest. If that is what you mean, then…”
…and then maybe I would say “that’s totally wrong. I came in really hoping and expecting to like this book, and was surprised and disappointed about how bad it was.” or maybe I would say “I admit that I felt really defensive when reading the book, but I did really earnestly try to give it a fair shake and to be scrupulously honest in my review, and I feel bad if I fell short of that” or whatever.
So yeah, it’s not like there’s no gray area or scope to elaborate. But the original “bad faith” accusation is a perfectly good starting point from which to elaborate if necessary. By the same token, if I say “you’re confused about X”, then yeah that could sure benefit from elaboration, but that doesn’t mean I was doing something wrong by saying that in the first place, or that we should drop the word “confused” from our vocabulary. Conversations always rely on lazy evaluation—you clarify things when it turns out that they’re both unclear to the other person and important to the conversation. You can’t just preemptively spell out every detail. It’s not practical.
I just did a quick search of my public writings for “good faith” / “bad faith”. The first three I found were this comment, and a footnote in that same post, and a comment here. All three used the term “good faith” rather than “bad faith”. When I think about it, I guess I do use “good faith” more often than “bad faith”. I usually use “good faith” as meaning something similar to “earnestly” and “actually trying” and “acting according to explicit motivations that even my opponents would endorse”.
Ah, here’s an example of me saying “bad faith”. You might find this interesting: I actually wrote ““Hype” typically means Person X is promoting a product, that they benefit from the success of that product, and that they are probably exaggerating the impressiveness of that product in bad faith (or at least, with a self-serving bias).” Note that I call out “bad faith” and “with a self-serving bias” as two different things, one implicitly worse than the other. The salesperson who knowingly lies and misleads from an explicit goal to advance his own career is one thing, the salesperson who sincerely (albeit incorrectly) believes his product will help the customer and is explicitly acting from that motivation is a different thing, and it is useful to distinguish one from the other, even if there’s a spectrum between them with gray area in between.
Yes it’s possible to be more specific than “good faith” / “bad faith” but that doesn’t mean those phrases aren’t communicating something substantive and useful, right? By the same token, every possible word and phrase and sentence could be elaborated into something more specific.
I also agree that there are edge cases, but again, that’s a near-universal property of using language to communicate.
Here’s my defense of good faith / bad faith.
STEP 1: Conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motives are not the only kind of motive, let alone the only influence on behavior, but they are a motive and an influence on behavior, and a particularly important one for many purposes.
For example, if I have a conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motive to murder you but find myself with cold feet, that’s a different situation than if I have a conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motive to not murder you but have anger and poor self-control. You very much care which one it is, when deciding what to say to me, guessing what’s gonna happen in the future, etc., even though both situations could be described as “you have some sources of desire to murder me and other sources of desire to not murder me”. That’s why we have terms like “self-control” and “self-awareness” that are relevant to how strongly one’s conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motives determine behavior. It’s a common thing to be thinking about.
STEP 2: Conscious / endorsed / ego-syntonic motives can vary continuously along many dimensions, but “good-faith” / “bad-faith” tends to label two opposite ends of one important such dimension of variation, in a generally pretty clear way (in context). As in the fallacy of gray, the existence of a spectrum does not reduce the usefulness of labeling its opposite ends.
I can’t immediately recall any specific examples from my own life.
I would probably explicitly spell out what I interpret the accusation of bad faith to mean, and then say that this accusation is not true (if it isn’t). For example, if I wrote a critical book review, and someone said I was criticizing the book in bad faith, maybe I would say “I understand your comment to be something like: You think I set out with an explicit goal to do a hit job on this book, because I’m opposed to its conclusions, and I am just saying whatever will make the book look bad without regard to being fair and honest. If that is what you mean, then…”
…and then maybe I would say “that’s totally wrong. I came in really hoping and expecting to like this book, and was surprised and disappointed about how bad it was.” or maybe I would say “I admit that I felt really defensive when reading the book, but I did really earnestly try to give it a fair shake and to be scrupulously honest in my review, and I feel bad if I fell short of that” or whatever.
So yeah, it’s not like there’s no gray area or scope to elaborate. But the original “bad faith” accusation is a perfectly good starting point from which to elaborate if necessary. By the same token, if I say “you’re confused about X”, then yeah that could sure benefit from elaboration, but that doesn’t mean I was doing something wrong by saying that in the first place, or that we should drop the word “confused” from our vocabulary. Conversations always rely on lazy evaluation—you clarify things when it turns out that they’re both unclear to the other person and important to the conversation. You can’t just preemptively spell out every detail. It’s not practical.
I just did a quick search of my public writings for “good faith” / “bad faith”. The first three I found were this comment, and a footnote in that same post, and a comment here. All three used the term “good faith” rather than “bad faith”. When I think about it, I guess I do use “good faith” more often than “bad faith”. I usually use “good faith” as meaning something similar to “earnestly” and “actually trying” and “acting according to explicit motivations that even my opponents would endorse”.
Ah, here’s an example of me saying “bad faith”. You might find this interesting: I actually wrote ““Hype” typically means Person X is promoting a product, that they benefit from the success of that product, and that they are probably exaggerating the impressiveness of that product in bad faith (or at least, with a self-serving bias).” Note that I call out “bad faith” and “with a self-serving bias” as two different things, one implicitly worse than the other. The salesperson who knowingly lies and misleads from an explicit goal to advance his own career is one thing, the salesperson who sincerely (albeit incorrectly) believes his product will help the customer and is explicitly acting from that motivation is a different thing, and it is useful to distinguish one from the other, even if there’s a spectrum between them with gray area in between.