Consider the premises (with scare quotes indicating technical jargon):
“Acting in Bad Faith” is Baysean evidence that a person is “Evil”
“Evil” people should be shunned
The original poster here is questioning statement 1, presenting evidence that “good” people act in bad faith too often for it to be evidence of “evil.”
However, I belive the original poster is using a more broad definition of “Acting in Bad Faith” than the people who support premise 1.
That definition, concisely, would be “engaging in behavior that is recognized in context as moving towards a particular goal, without having that goal.”
Contrast this with the OP quote: bad faith is when someone’s apparent reasons for doing something aren’t the same as the real reasons.
The persons apparent reasons don’t matter, what matters is the socially determined values associated with specific behaviors, as in the Wikipedia examples. While some behavior (eg, a conversation) can have multiple goals, some special things (waving a white flag, arguing in court, and now in the 21st century that includes arguing outside of court) have specific expected goals (respectively: allowing a person to withdraw from a fight without dying, to present factual evidence that favors one side of a conflict, and to persuade others of your viewpoint). When an actor fails to hold those generally understood goals, that disrupts the social contract and “we” call it “Acting in Bad Faith”
A clarification:
Consider the premises (with scare quotes indicating technical jargon):
“Acting in Bad Faith” is Baysean evidence that a person is “Evil”
“Evil” people should be shunned
The original poster here is questioning statement 1, presenting evidence that “good” people act in bad faith too often for it to be evidence of “evil.”
However, I belive the original poster is using a more broad definition of “Acting in Bad Faith” than the people who support premise 1.
That definition, concisely, would be “engaging in behavior that is recognized in context as moving towards a particular goal, without having that goal.” Contrast this with the OP quote: bad faith is when someone’s apparent reasons for doing something aren’t the same as the real reasons. The persons apparent reasons don’t matter, what matters is the socially determined values associated with specific behaviors, as in the Wikipedia examples. While some behavior (eg, a conversation) can have multiple goals, some special things (waving a white flag, arguing in court, and now in the 21st century that includes arguing outside of court) have specific expected goals (respectively: allowing a person to withdraw from a fight without dying, to present factual evidence that favors one side of a conflict, and to persuade others of your viewpoint). When an actor fails to hold those generally understood goals, that disrupts the social contract and “we” call it “Acting in Bad Faith”