Honestly, I’ve seen a few different definitions for it, from an argument that’s just meant to br antagonistic, another is that it’s one where the one making seeks to win no matter what, another is where the person making it knows it’s wrong but makes it anyway.
Can anyone nail down what arguing in bad faith actually is for me? If so, that’d be great.
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A bad faith argument is one that is deliberately deceptive, either about the facts or about the arguer’s motivations. In general, someone arguing in bad faith is not arguing to learn the truth or to present an honest set of facts, but to support one side regardless of what the facts may say.
Note that “bad faith” is different from “wrong”. A person who honestly believes false things is not operating in bad faith. Nor is a person who is (openly and honestly) advocating for one position and thinks other positions are wrong. Bad faith is about deception of either fact or motivation, not about correctness or disagreement.
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For example, suppose that there are two groups in a country, group A and group B. There are 100 jerks in group A and 110 jerks in group B. A bad faith argument from someone who knows this fact might go:
* Wow, group A is so terrible! They have 100 jerks! That is so many jerks!
The bad faith here is that the speaker is concealing the fact that group B in fact has even more jerks, because that fact does not support your goal with this argument (to attack group A).
For a real world example, consider groups like the [American College of Pediatricians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_College_of_Pediatricians). This is a group named to deliberately cause confusion with an actual professional medical organization, the [American Academy of Pediatrics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Academy_of_Pediatrics), and to allow bad faith arguments of the form:
* The American College of Pediatricians [which is a social-conservative advocacy group] says being gay is bad for kids.
The goal here is to mislead listeners into thinking that this is a mainstream medical opinion via the use of a deceptively official-sounding name.
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