bad faith, n.
Etymology:
< bad adj. + faith n. In sense 1 after good faith n.; compare classical Latin mala fidēs mala fides n. and French †male foi (13th cent. in Anglo-Norman as male fei , in de male fei faithless). In sense 2 after French mauvaise foi mauvaise foi n.
1. Intent to deceive; insincerity, dishonesty; faithlessness, disloyalty; treachery. Now freq. in in bad faith. Cf. good faith n., Punic faith n. at Punic n. and adj. Special uses.
1653 H. Cogan tr. F. M. Pinto Voy. & Adventures xlvi. 179
Now because it seemed strange unto them, that we had voluntarily submitted our selves in that sort to the bad faith of the Chineses [Pg. à pouca verdade dos Chins], they asked of us from what Country we came.
1756 tr. F. X. de Oliveira Pathetic Disc. Calamities Portugal 27
It is to be fear'd that your sinful, your delusive Errors, your Frauds, and your bad Faith, will still continue.
1780 J. Torris Let. 13 May in B. Franklin Papers
(1996)
XXXII. 385
Your Excellency..will see the flat Contradictions & bad faith in the reports of the Parjured Capt. Roodenberg.
1789 H. More Lett.
(1925)
126
Her reputation has been committed by the bad faith of a friend.
1819 Niles' Weekly Reg. 21 Aug. 122
That he has executed it [sc. a charter] in bad faith, there is no doubt.
1832 J. R. McCulloch Dict. Commerce 576
The Hansards were every now and then accused of acting with bad faith.
1874 Punch 4 June 3/1
Lord Strathnairn charged the late Secretary for War with bad faith, in not enlisting men for short and long service together.
1956 W. S. Churchill Hist. Eng.-speaking Peoples II. v. v. 174
An act of bad faith which after many stormy years was to cost him his life.
1991 Blitz Sept. 114/2
A classic case of the media acting in bad faith and then going on a fashionably reflexive mea culpa trip.
2010 Vanity Fair Nov. 126/2
The gamesmanship and bad faith of trying to get others to feel sorry for us with our weepy stories and bared scars.
1653—2010(Hide quotations)
2. spec. In the existentialist philosophy of Sartre: self-deception practised in order to avoid absolute responsibility for one's own actions; = mauvaise foi n.
1947 Proc. Aristotelian Soc. 47 209
Merely to build a perversely dogmatic philosophy for dramatic effect would be bad faith.
1949 Times Lit. Suppl. 20 May 326
Baudelaire, according to M. Sartre..was a man of bad faith, hiding the fact of his lack of courage behind the fiction of his unhappy destiny.
1953 H. E. Barnes tr. J.-P. Sartre Existential Psychoanal. ii. i. 205
It is best to choose and to examine one determined falsehood which is essential to human reality and which is such that consciousness instead of directing its negation outward turns it toward itself. This attitude, it seems to me, is bad faith.
1987 M. Butler in D. Walder Lit. in Mod. World
(1990)
11
A tactic devoted to exposing the bad faith of literature as a whole is hardly timely.
1989 R. Tong Feminist Thought vii. 197
If we argue that we do not experience any of the psychic burdens—dread, anguish, nausea—that he described, Sartre will accuse us of ‘bad faith’.
2005 A. Masters Stuart v. 41
He is like the waiter in Sartre's Words: acting the role of waiter—a waiter in bad faith—until one day he looks around and finds all his friends are rough sleepers.
1947—2005(Hide quotations)
