Sartre's Argumentative Analysis

Adrift in an uncaring and meaningless universe, mankind only true solace is the radical freedom such an absurd existence provides. It is a shame that mankind chooses to use this freedom to construct silly epistemological arguments about morality as it relates to an outdated form of transportation, but human freedom has no limits but those we set upon ourselves. In that sense, the argument that the spelunkers on trial “had” to cannibalize one of their own in order to use their flesh to survive has nary a leg to stand on. Whatever conjunctions you may have about “justification or excuse” or the fact that the victim in this case was the one who devised the grisly plot that ended in his own death and consumption wither and die against the sheer …show more content…
So what? They’d still argue that they had no other choice, and as such the “justification or excuse” clause in the town’s law renders them innocent, as they have the justification of “having” to kill Whetmore in order to survive. They’d be gravely mistaken in believing that. Man may delude themselves into believing that only one option exists, but there is always a choice. To do otherwise would be to live in bad faith. In its original sense as defined by Sartre, bad faith is where in the face of pressure - whether it be social, mental, or physical - humans adopt false positions and values and divorce themselves from their true selves. Consider Jean-Paul Sartre 's example of a waiter utterly consumed by the desire to appear “waiter-like”: “His voice oozes with an eagerness to please; he carries food rigidly and ostentatiously; his movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid." Feeling an obligation to behave as the perfect model of service in order to impress his clients and employers, the waiter sacrifices his true self and adopts a false identity. He is no longer a thinking, feeling person with wants and desires of his very own; he has reduced himself to merely a human cog utterly divorced from any reality. Living in bad faith means that one uses the radical freedom granted by conscious thought to trample all over any semblance of choice present in the first place. As Sartre further puts it, “Those living in this false reality manifestly know they are free but do not acknowledge it. Bad faith is paradoxical in this regard: when acting in bad faith, a person is both aware and, in a sense, unaware that they are free.” In that moment in the cave, the spelunkers, acting in bad faith, deceived themselves into thinking the only option in the situation was to murder one of their own to survive. Yet the option to do nothing and simply languish together as a group of five was always there, a choice