Is Business Bluffing Ethics

Is Business Bluffing Ethics

Is Business Bluffing Ethical? Is an essay that is written by Albert Carr in the Harvard Business Review in 1968. He contends in this article that business is a game like Poker that requires some type of bluffing. As he explains it, this bluffing is an ethical behavior and it shouldn’t be compared to personal ethics. He contends that all the players of the game know the rules of the game and this is the way it is played. Like a customer who asks a salesperson about the quote of a car, he/she already knows that the quote that is given by the salesperson is not the real price of the car but the starting point of negotiation. Another bluffing involves withholding part of the truth about something to strengthen someone’s position. Bluffing then, is a game strategy that is played by one or more individuals who want to have the upper hand in the game. In short, bluffing is a tactic to gain advantage on others and is justified bin the business field as all business persons are playing the same game, according to Carr. He, however, condemns the unethical use of bluffing.

This approach/theory has been a controversial issue for decades as some of its opponents claim that this approach splits the personality of a business person into two parts. One is business personality with different ethics and the other is social personality with personal ethics. Others claim that bluffing is similar to lying and that a business person should have high integrity and trustworthy. Others argue that what about the health care business, what if physicians and patients started bluffing to each other, what would happen to the patient health, let alone physicians and MCOs have warranted truth-telling and that quality of medical care depends on it. Moreover, what about business students who apply this approach? They probably will view people as numbers and objects because their moral sensitivities were attuned.