Download Carr Study Questions

Carr Study Questions
Albert Carr's "Is Business Bluffing Ethical?," despite its age (and regrettable sexism),
is still widely read in Business Ethics classes. Students often find the views it expresses
persuasive and appealing, and business people sometimes make arguments similar to Carr’s.
These arguments are flawed, however, and Carr’s conclusions are more radical than they
might first appear. It is important to understand what is wrong with both the arguments and
the conclusions.
Before turning to criticism, however, it is important to be clear about Carr's
conclusions and the structure of the arguments for them. The main argument is a
straightforward argument by analogy:
1) Poker and business have many things in common: both are games, both "have a large
element of chance," in both winning requires "steady skill," “intimate knowledge of the
rules,” “insight into the psychology of other players,” “a bold front," and so forth. Most
importantly, bluffing is permissible according to the rules of both poker and business.
2) Bluffing in poker is also morally permissible.
3) Therefore, bluffing in business is morally permissible.1
Let us refer to 3) as the narrow thesis.
At the same time, Carr defends a much more ambitious conclusion. Judging by the
examples he mentions, he not only approves of bluffing in business, but he also approves of a
wide range of morally questionable business practices. He writes, "as long as a company does
not transgress the rules of the game set by law, it has the legal right to shape its strategy
without reference to anything but its profits." Of course a company has the legal right to do
anything that is not against the law - no one denies that. What Carr seems to mean, though, is
that a company has the moral right to do anything that is not against the law in order to make
profits. This is what the "special ethics" of business is all about. We can reconstruct his
reasoning here by adding the following claims to the argument sketched above:
4) In fact, anything permitted by the rules of business is morally permissible in business.
5) The rules of business permit everything that is not against the law.
6) Therefore, everything that is not against the law is morally permissible in business.
1
One might think that Carr is not in fact claiming 3). For example, he says at one point that "decisions in
[business] are, in the final test, decisions of strategy not of ethics," and you could take this to mean that business
decisions are neither ethical nor unethical, which is to say that ethical evaluations do not properly apply to
business. The problem here is that Carr uses 'ethics' and 'morality' in two different senses. In one sense, Carr
means by these terms what he alternatively calls "private" or "religious" or "church" ethics - the moral standards
that many of us learn from our parents and use in our everyday interactions with others (e.g. the Golden Rule,
"love your neighbor as yourself," etc.). In another sense, Carr means 'ethics' and 'morality' to refer to the
distinctive norms that apply to a particular kind of practice, such as poker or business, in the same way that he
sometimes speaks about the "special ethics" of business. When he says business decisions are "of strategy not of
ethics," he means that private or church ethics do not apply to them. But when Carr writes that, "in their office
lives [business people] cease to be private citizens; they become game players who must be guided by a
somewhat different set of ethical standards," he is obviously speaking of ethics in the second "special" sense. So
he is claiming 3); bluffing is morally permissible in business, even though it is often not permissible in other
contexts.
Let's refer to 6) as the wide thesis. Distinguishing the narrow and the wide thesis is important
because the plausibility of Carr’s position depends quite a bit on which of the two we have in
mind. Carr, unfortunately, tends to jump back and forth between them, as though they
amounted to the same thing, but in fact they differ considerably.
Questions:
1. Poker allows a player to with a good hand to raise the stakes of the bet so as to potentially
win more money. But one can also raise the stakes with a weak hand - this is a bluff. The
strategy is to make others think you have a good hand so they'll all "fold" and you will win
without necessarily having the best hand. Briefly describe a business “bluff” most closely
analogous to a poker bluff. Is this bluff also morally permissible?
2. Describe two differences between poker and business that undermine Carr’s analogy.
3. Describe two of Carr’s illustrations of ethically appropriate business practices that seem
relevantly different than the poker bluff. (Even if we accept that business bluffing is okay, are
all of the practices he describes really analogous to business bluffing?)
4. Describe a counterexample to Carr’s wide thesis, i.e., a business practice that is within a
company’s legal rights (other than the examples given so far either by you or Carr) that is
nonetheless morally wrong.