cautions, “I have acknowledged that existence precedes essence, and that
man is a free being who, under any circumstances, can only will his
freedom, I have at the same time acknowledged that I must will the
freedom of others” (EH 49 , emphasis added). He believes that this
warrants his making moral judgments of inauthentic types such as those
who conceal their freedom by appeal to determinism (“cowards”) and
those who try to justify their existence when in fact it is contingent
(“bastards”). Judgments of bad faith strictly speaking, on the other hand,
seem to be errors of judgment or self-deception or cognitive dissonance
that, when Sartre is being precise, have no immediate moral standing.
When someone, for example, simply “chooses bad faith,” Sartre
remarks, “I do not pass moral judgment against him, but I call his bad
faith an error.” In effect, it’s a judgment of truth, “a logical rather than a
value judgment” (EH 47 ). As we noted earlier in our study, Sartre
seldom manages to distinguish these two lines of judgment in terms of
moral values and disvalues. He often takes them equivalently, despite
insisting on several occasions that judgments of bad faith have no moral
significance. It seems that when the agent in question is seeking excuses
for his bad faith rather than “owning up to it” and acknowledging its free
choice, it is only in such cases that bad faith slips into inauthenticity.
So when Sartre simply denies that “bad faith” has moral value, he is
failing to make the distinctions introduced here.
At this point, Sartre, the implacable foe of ethical naturalism, crosses
the bridge from fact to value. Good faith is seen to require not only
consistency but that I acknowledge by my choices, for example, by
assuming the responsibility which accompanies them, that I am the
foundation of all values. “Choosing freedom,” the criterion of good
faith, is not the same as “maximizing” some value, for freedom is neither
the object nor the specific content of our choice. Rather, freedom
constitutes what Sartre terms theform of our choice, the ultimate
meaning (sens) of our actions (seeEH 49 ).
- As soon as there is commitment, our concrete freedom “depends entirely on the
freedom of others and the freedom of others depends on our own” (EH 48 ). What
elsewhere I have called Sartre’s “universal freedom conditional”^22 forms the
linchpin of his social ethic. Though it has antecedents in the ontology ofBeing
(^22) SeeSME 33.
“Is Existentialism a Humanism?” 241