Well, while your friend may be acting in a way that suggests that he cares about learning information from you, it isn’t to conceal his true motivation from you. Wanting to enjoy a social interaction with you is not a secret, which is the core difference between this example you brought up and acting in bad faith, where the real intent is intentionally hidden.
I did read the article, and still I hastily reached for the concept of “intentional deceit” when grasping for what I felt (and still feel) to be a difference between your example and the author’s. Sorry.
But even now that you point out that the author excludes intentional deceit from his definition of bad faith (which I had read but somehow didn’t apply in my comment), I only feel like I missed the nail, but a nail is still there, which I will now try to hit on the head.
So here’s my second attempt: the difference between your example and the author’s has nothing to do with conscious intent to deceive, but with whether the behavior is misleading (as defined in the text) at all, consciously or not. You say that your friend’s behavior shows a desire to gather information, not a desire to enjoy a social interaction; but given that a social interaction is always about something (isn’t it?), is it even possible to enjoy an interaction without appearing to be motivated by the content of the interaction instead? If not, then what’s your reference for counting a behavior as “overtly motivated by a desire to socialize” or not?
What would you say about Tucker Carlson (while he was at Fox) and Rachel Maddow (MSBC) who argued in court that their audience doesn’t take them literally and know that they are just entertainers as a defense against claims of defamation.
I would expect Zack to say that both engage in Bad Faith when they are saying things that are not true but work for engaging the audience.
While the audience knows they are watching partly because of entertainment, the overt appearance of any statement is one of being told the truth. The same goes for questions asked during a friendly conversation. We know we are together because we care about spending time with each other but the surface appearence of any question is still about wanting to know the answer to that question.
Well, while your friend may be acting in a way that suggests that he cares about learning information from you, it isn’t to conceal his true motivation from you. Wanting to enjoy a social interaction with you is not a secret, which is the core difference between this example you brought up and acting in bad faith, where the real intent is intentionally hidden.
How about reading the post to which I’m replying? It quite explicitly defines bad faith in a way that not about “conscious intent to deceive”.
I did read the article, and still I hastily reached for the concept of “intentional deceit” when grasping for what I felt (and still feel) to be a difference between your example and the author’s. Sorry.
But even now that you point out that the author excludes intentional deceit from his definition of bad faith (which I had read but somehow didn’t apply in my comment), I only feel like I missed the nail, but a nail is still there, which I will now try to hit on the head.
So here’s my second attempt: the difference between your example and the author’s has nothing to do with conscious intent to deceive, but with whether the behavior is misleading (as defined in the text) at all, consciously or not. You say that your friend’s behavior shows a desire to gather information, not a desire to enjoy a social interaction; but given that a social interaction is always about something (isn’t it?), is it even possible to enjoy an interaction without appearing to be motivated by the content of the interaction instead? If not, then what’s your reference for counting a behavior as “overtly motivated by a desire to socialize” or not?
What would you say about Tucker Carlson (while he was at Fox) and Rachel Maddow (MSBC) who argued in court that their audience doesn’t take them literally and know that they are just entertainers as a defense against claims of defamation.
I would expect Zack to say that both engage in Bad Faith when they are saying things that are not true but work for engaging the audience.
While the audience knows they are watching partly because of entertainment, the overt appearance of any statement is one of being told the truth. The same goes for questions asked during a friendly conversation. We know we are together because we care about spending time with each other but the surface appearence of any question is still about wanting to know the answer to that question.