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Articles

Is Homosexuality ‘Bad Faith’?

Terri Murray says that Jean-Paul Sartre was simply wrong about gay people and self-deception.

Bad faith is Sartre’s conception of self-deception. Bad faith arises out of the human predicament – that is, our dread of freedom, of self-creation. According to Sartre, this predicament is unique to humans because, unlike other objects, which are fully whatever they are, we are ‘nothing’ at the core of our being. That is, we have no essential nature or ‘essence’ until we improvise one through our own choices and actions. This, for Sartre, is why humans are responsible for what they become, in a way that tables, chairs, plants and animals are not.

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