by Simon Renatus
Safety Is a Choice You Make Every Day. Safety does not happen by accident, it begins with a conscious decision. (Your SAFE Guide, 2026)
But what exactly do we mean by choice, and what, therefore, are we holding people accountable for? And, is this a ‘free choice’?
We can approach choice through many lenses. Here, we use Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological philosophy to explore the relationship between our circumstances, possibilities, volition and freedom.
Choice can appear deceptively simple: a person encounters a situation, rationally considers the available options, and selects the optimal course of action. Yet no person encounters the world from nowhere. We find ourselves already situated within it, with a body, history, relationships, roles, responsibilities and circumstances we did not wholly choose.
Nor does choice necessarily arise through conscious deliberation. People can have little or no direct introspective access to the higher-order cognitive processes that shape their responses (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Some of what we call ‘choice’ may therefore be a-rational rather than consciously reasoned.
Choice is also temporal. The world does not pause while a person selects from a stable menu of options. Situations unfold while we are within them. Other people respond, meanings shift, possibilities emerge and recede, and what appears possible in one moment may not appear possible in the next.
From within that situated existence, possibilities still remain. How, then, should we understand the relationship between what is already given and what remains possible?
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre explores this tension through two ordinary examples: a waiter in a café and a woman on a date. Through them, he develops his account of facticity, transcendence and ‘bad faith’, asking how our circumstances can situate us without completely determining us.
Facticity refers to what is already given in our situation: our past, our bodies and the conditions within which we find ourselves. Transcendence describes the way consciousness exceeds what is given toward possibilities not yet realised.
Facticity and transcendence are not competing states to be balanced, nor is there some ideal position between them. There is no happy average of the two. For Sartre, both are true simultaneously. We are situated within what is already given while remaining open toward possibility.
Bad faith emerges when we attempt to deny this uncomfortable coexistence by treating ourselves as though we are wholly determined by our circumstances, or as though we can somehow escape them altogether.
This raises a question for Safety that is unexplored: when we say someone had a choice, what exactly are we claiming about the person who had to choose?
The Waiter
Sartre asks us to observe a waiter. There is something curious about him.
All his behaviour seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms; the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. (Sartre, 1956, p. 101)
His movements are a little too quick and precise, his manner a little too eager. That his behaviour ‘seems to us a game’ is an odd observation. The description suggests he is playing at being a waiter. But the man is a waiter. He serves customers in a café. What could it mean to say that he is playing at being what he already is?
The role itself is not the problem. Being a waiter is part of his facticity. He finds himself within a particular occupation, workplace and set of expectations. Customers expect service. His employer expects him to perform his work. His circumstances are real and cannot be wished away.
The problem arises when the waiter begins to behave as though he can completely coincide with the role.
A cup on one of his tables simply is a cup. It has no relationship with its being a cup and does not project itself toward possibilities. A human being cannot exist in this way. The waiter may be a waiter, but waiter can never exhaust what he is. He can interpret the role, resist aspects of it, embrace it, perform it differently, leave it, or imagine possibilities beyond it. His facticity situates him, but does not completely determine him.
This is transcendence. It is not a discrete decision or action, but the way human consciousness exceeds what is given toward possibility. The choices the waiter makes are expressions of it.
But the waiter can obscure this from himself: I am a waiter. Therefore, this is simply how a waiter must be. In this statement, something nuanced has happened. A truth about his situation has become a claim about what determines him. Sartre calls this bad faith.
In everyday language, we understand the term ‘bad faith’ as acting dishonestly toward another, perhaps concealing an agenda or deliberately deceiving them. In Sartre’s context, the deception is directed inward. The waiter need not deceive his customers. Rather, he obscures from himself something about his own existence: although he really is situated as a waiter, he can never be reduced entirely to being one.
What matters here is not the café, but the temptation to let a role exhaust the person who occupies it. The same temptation can arise in a safety investigation.
The Investigator
Consider now a safety investigation. An incident has occurred. The organisation requires an ICAM investigation and assigns the Safety Advisor to conduct it. They must follow a method, gather evidence, interview people, consider categories, meet timeframes and produce a report. This is the investigator’s facticity. None of it disappears simply because they wish to practise differently.
It would be easy, however, for the investigator to become Sartre’s waiter: I am the investigator. This is ICAM. I follow the method. In effect, playing at being an investigator.
The method can begin to determine not only how the investigation is structured, but how the investigator encounters the people within it. They may reduce a person to a source of information, extracting evidence, interpreting it and placing it into predetermined categories. In that moment, the investigator risks encountering them as though they were the waiter’s cup: an object.
Another possibility remains without abandoning ICAM altogether. The investigator can recognise that the method structures the investigation without completely determining the human encounter within it. Sitting opposite another person, they can become curious about their lived experience. What was happening for them at the time? What were they attending to? What made sense from where they stood? What did they understand others expected of them? What possibilities appeared available, and which possibilities did not appear at all? The investigator still completes the investigation and writes the report, but neither the role nor the method exhausts the possibilities of the encounter.
In either case, the organisational artefact may look remarkably similar: a completed ICAM investigation report. But sameness of form does not imply sameness of meaning. Between the event and the artefact, people remember, speak, listen, question, interpret and make meaning from what occurred.
What the investigator attends to, the questions they ask, the categories they bring and the relationship they establish all shape what the phenomenon discloses. The report may contain the findings of the investigation. It can never contain the whole phenomenon from which those findings emerged. Here, the risk of bad faith lies in the investigator treating their situation as though it completely determines them.
The Date
Sartre’s second example is a different encounter: a woman on a date.
She recognises that the man sitting with her has intentions toward her. His words and gestures carry possibilities she understands, but whose meaning she does not yet wish to confront. She neither wants to encourage those intentions nor bring the encounter to an end.
Then he takes her hand. She leaves it there, but does not reciprocate.
This act of her companion risks changing the situation by calling for an immediate decision. To leave the hand there is to consent in herself to flirt, to engage herself. To withdraw it is to break the troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm. (Sartre, 1956, p. 97)
She could withdraw her hand, place her other hand over his, or leave. Each possibility would allow the encounter to unfold differently.
Sartre describes her as allowing her hand to rest passively in his, almost as though it were an object disconnected from the person whose hand it is, while she continues their conversation.
At first glance, this could be interpreted simply as choosing not to choose. But this does not quite reach the point. The woman has not ceased to be embodied because she directs her attention elsewhere. Her hand remains hers. The man holds it within a situation whose meaning she already understands. Yet she attempts to separate herself from that embodied reality, treating the hand almost as a thing whose meaning she need not yet own.
Where the waiter treats himself as though he were nothing but his facticity, the woman attempts the opposite movement: to distance herself from it. The waiter says: this is what I am. The woman behaves as though: this is happening, but it need not yet belong to me.
Neither succeeds.
The waiter cannot erase his transcendence by disappearing into his role. The woman cannot erase her facticity by distancing herself from the meaning of her embodied situation. In both cases, facticity and transcendence remain true simultaneously.
This is what makes Sartre’s account of bad faith more difficult than simply refusing to choose. Bad faith involves a particular relationship with ourselves. We attempt to treat one dimension of our existence as though the other could somehow disappear.
Returning to the Investigation
The investigator is interviewing a person involved in the event. The method provides questions to ask, information to gather and categories through which the event will eventually be analysed.
During the conversation, however, something emerges that does not fit neatly within the investigative structure. The person hesitates when describing a particular moment. Their account changes subtly. They describe knowing that something did not feel right, yet continuing. Perhaps they mention pressure from others, uncertainty about their authority, or something peripheral that the investigator senses may carry meaning.
The investigator notices it. They could remain with the hesitation and allow the conversation to unfold differently, or move on. The next question is waiting. The method provides somewhere comfortable to go. Like the woman distancing herself from the meaning of her hand, the investigator can leave what has appeared present while distancing themselves from its meaning.
Nothing procedurally improper need occur. The investigator continues the interview, asks the remaining questions, completes the ICAM and produces the report.
This does not mean that every hesitation contains some hidden truth, nor that an investigator who follows a method is acting in bad faith. Sartre does not give us licence to make psychological judgements about another person’s inner world. Rather, his example gives the investigator a question to ask themselves: what am I noticing here that I may be distancing myself from because engaging with it would complicate my present understanding?
The investigator might put the prepared questions aside for a moment and remain with what has appeared. What did “it didn’t feel right” mean to this person? What were they experiencing? What possibilities did they perceive? What did they understand others expected of them? What made continuing appear reasonable at the time?
The investigator remains situated within the same role, method and organisational expectations. But those facts do not exhaust the possibilities available within the encounter.
Conclusion: What Choice?
Sartre makes the safety claim ‘Safety is a choice you make’ considerably less comfortable. His two examples offer the investigator two cautions:
The waiter applied to investigation: Don’t disappear into the method.
The date applied to investigation: Don’t disappear from what the encounter reveals.
He offers no model of good faith as the cure for bad faith. There is nothing in facticity and transcendence that needs curing; both belong to human existence. Safety may prefer binaries, but the task here is not to resolve the tension. We do not need to choose between circumstance and freedom as competing explanations for a person’s actions. The person was situated and remained open toward possibility.
After an event, the investigator occupies a position that the person involved never possessed. The investigator can look back upon the outcome. What occurred is now given. Facticity.
From this almost God-like vantage comes another temptation: to encounter the person primarily through what they might have done otherwise, as though their transcendence could somehow stand apart from the circumstances within which they had to act. The folly is to mistake a possibility visible in retrospect for one that meaningfully showed itself to the person at the time.
No one chooses from nowhere, and no one chooses outside time. In your next investigation, it may be worth asking: am I holding this person’s facticity and transcendence as simultaneously true? Have I allowed either to disappear? And what of my own?
References
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231–259. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231
Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and nothingness: A phenomenological essay on ontology (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). Washington Square Press.
Your SAFE Guide. (2026, January 6). Safety is a choice you make every day. [Facebook post]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/YourSafeGuide/posts/safety-is-a-choice-you-make-every-daysafety-does-not-happen-by-accident-it-begin/122132079176993218/
brhttps://safetyrisk.net/sartre-safety-and-the-problem-of-human-choice/
Prompt