Narrative and Bad Faith.

This paper is part of a larger project in which I investigate what I call the cultivation of responsiveness. In the larger project I ask: How can individuals come to acknowledge practically meaningful connections between their everyday activities and the suffering of distant others? I call such acknowledgement responsiveness. Every day, sweatshop workers labor in anonymous obscurity under fundamentally exploitative and often violent conditions, producing consumer goods for purchase around the world. These workers are often in distant countries, out of sight and (frequently) out of mind. Many scholars and activists claim that we contribute to their suffering when we buy sweatshop merchandise, and that we therefore have a responsibility to do something about such suffering: Protest sweatshops, for example, and take our business elsewhere. And yet many of us continue to buy the merchandise, and the suffering continues unabated. Why is it sometimes so difficult to acknowledge our implication in the suffering of others? Distance alone cannot be the answer; media technologies offer more than enough access to evidence of the suffering of sweatshop workers and others too. In this paper I show how the phenomenon of bad faith impedes the cultivation of responsiveness, and what it might mean to overcome that phenomenon. What emerges is that bad faith and its opposite are sustained by the narratives that structure our apprehension of our condition. These can be diagnostic narratives that uncover instances of bad faith; or they can be self-deceiving narratives, which reinforce bad faith. Attention to the narrative structure of bad faith, and its opposite, calls for more systematic attention to the ways in which narratives structure our experiences of social and political life. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]