Question: Do you agree or disagree with Carr’s premise?

The article title “Is Business Bluffing Ethical?” by Albert Z. Carr. It argues that business ethics essentially are the ethics of a game, particularly poker, and that they differ significantly from the ethics of private life. Game ethics, maintain Carr, include such practices as bluffing and not telling the whole truth, which the ethics of private life would consider to be immoral. Since the time of its appearance, the article has been reprinted in many readings books on business ethics and has become a classic on the subject.

The issues raised in Carr’s article and challenges his fundamental premises, in which I strongly disagree with Carr's premises (1) The first premise to be challenged is Carr’s exclusion of other ethical theories that pertain to the “ethics of private life”; when only one theory – namely, the Judeo-Christian religious theory of altruism – is considered synonymous with ethics, a whole continuum of other theories that might account for business practice is ignored. (2)The second premise to be challenged is the notion that business is a game, but the present writer will argue that business is not a game and indeed that the game analogy Carr uses leads him to defend some truly unsavory practices, such as cowardice. (3) And finally the third premise to be challenged is Carr’s assumption that deception is inherent in the art of negotiation; however, when negotiation is properly understood the concept and activity of bluffing cease entirely to be relevant to business behavior.

The premise, “if it’s legal, then it’s moral,” ignores the fact that what is legal can be immoral and what is immoral is not necessarily illegal. The premise is especially dangerous and vicious if one recalls Nazi Germany wherein millions of Jews were legally sent to their deaths; such actions can hardly be described as moral, yet the premise of Carr’s article would endorse such behavior. On the other hand, adultery is immoral according to most ethical theories, because of the deception involved, but it is illegal. (It is grounds for divorce, but the dispute is private, between husband and wife). Law and ethics are two separate domains that overlap one another but are not identical. Laws can be unethical and unethical behavior in some societies can be declared to be illegal. The challenge of political science and philosophy is to establish laws that are ethical.