Bluffing Case

Albert Carr published an article to the Harvard Business Review in 1968 titled "Is Business Bluffing Ethical?". The premise of which is to argue that business ethics differ significantly from the ethics of private life. The ethics of private life considers bluffing and withholding facts immoral. Carr insists, however, that game ethics encourages such behavior and is in-fact analogous to poker. This exploratory paper will attempt to revisit Carr's paradigms and arguments with constructed philosophical arguments that counter the premises of his article. The first premise to be challenged is the notion that business is merely a game. The second premise to be challenged is the ethical frameworks, or the lack of, which operate the mechanics of his cases and arguments.

Although critics have illustrated through utilitarianism and deontoligical arguments that deceit and bluffing are indeed immoral in business, ultimately the fallacy lies in the analogy. Granted, Carr's argument of the business-game analogy offers businessmen and layman alike a strong intuitive appeal. But the analogy contains no merit when the traits of both a business and a colloquial game are examined.

The purpose of a game is to win. And where there are winners, there are losers. Business is not an activity with clear winners and losers, regardless of their vanity point. The goodwill of a company's stakeholders, including but not limited to: Suppliers, customers, and partners, is at great risk in the business-game analogy. Corporations do indeed have competitors which they appear to vehemently defend against. As Daryl Koehn explains in his article for the Journal of Business Ethics: "But their individual survival requires that they try to prosper by accustoming their customers to predictably satisfactory service[s] and products so that these customers will buy from them again (pg. 1448)." While there are multiple types of games with diverse rules and norms, it should be noted that they are all ultimately zero-sum games in which there are explicit beneficiaries and the rest, often times the majority, are the losers. Daryl Koehn proposes that instead of an us-versus-them game, the activity should be participatory with a common mission. For example, when hikers become lost during their expedition, people often unite with one sole mission: To find and retrieve the hikers back to health and safety. One should not cast an analogy of business and bluffing onto this scenario as it is a high-stake activity and doing so would endanger lives.

The next trait of a game is that losers conventionally suffer consequences. Carr explains an example of a manager dying his gray hair so as to appear younger and more vigorous to his colleagues: "This was a lie, yet within the accepted rules of the business game, no moral culpability was attaches to this (pg. 3)." Indeed, no moral culpability can be observed from this scenario because the stakes are minute. When considering business decisions one must be aware the many decisions do affect many people and can have devastating consequences. In a business-game analogy there are winners. A corporation that has successfully gained a large market share through deceit and bluff are invariably losers due to the externalities caused by their decisions and behavior. Every action has a reaction and every decision has consequences. The difficulty lies in the interpretation since consequences typically become obscured by diffusion; deemed externalities by economists.

Carr insidiously assumes that poker and business are alike. There is an element of chance in both activities. Similarly, beneficiaries of an activity is an organization, team, or individual that who "plays with steady skill". Furthermore, a poker who risks, much less squanders, his and his family's assets is more of an addict than a great player. Unlike poker, business is hardly governed by a strict set of rules. And the rules that do exist serve as a guideline rather than regulate the action of the individuals such as that of a game. Moreover, Carr encourages businesspeople to do what it takes to win although there are no clear rules in business which can have devastating consequences. As such, bluffing in business while one cannot fathom all implicit consequences is of little help.

Carr also alludes to an alarming practice by claiming that businesspeople do not make up the law, they merely abide by them. Firstly, the law of business and ethics associated with such are grand and vary between different sovereign bodies and cultures and their respected jurisdictions. It would be impressive to find an individual that has not only memorized but also abides by each rule. This is in contrast with games where the rules of the game are both fixed and explicit. For example, in business, especially the private sector, businesspeople are encouraged to be dynamic and to always be curiously seeking out change that would improve any business function. Therefore, even if a rule existed to deceive and bluff, there is no promise of it being present tomorrow. Hence, one is not entitled to claim that business is a frigid and simple game in which the goal is to practice one-upsmanship through such tactics.

Proponents of the business-game reasons that since the rules of the game are simply the rules, reflection on the rightness of the business decision action does appear necessary. Asserting that business has the characteristics of a game and exhibits similar ethics holds little merit. Daryl Koen succinctly captures the fallacy of business-game analogy: "This reasoning fails to persuade because the above analysis has shown that business bears almost no resemblance to to a game understood as a rule-constituted low-risk private

...