Shrewd Bargaining on the Moral Frontier: Toward a Theory of Morality in Practice
本文提出互信视角解释商业实践中对同行行为的关注，认为道德义务基于相互信任，当信任缺失时义务减弱。通过谈判中隐瞒偏好的欺骗案例，区分理想道德与实践道德，为应用伦理学家提供贴近实践的理论。
From a traditional moral point of view, business practitioners often seem overly concerned about the behavior of their peers in deciding how they ought to act.We propose to account for this concern by introducing a mutual trust perspective, where moral obligations are grounded in a sense of trust that others will abide by the same rules.When grounds for trust are absent, the obligation is weakened.We illustrate this perspective by examining the widespread ambivalence with regard to deception about one's settlement preferences in negotiation.On an abstract level, such deception generally seems undesirable, though in many individual cases it is condoned, even admired as shrewd bargaining.Because of the difficulty in verifying someone's settlement preferences, it is hard to establish a basis for trusting the revelations of the other party, especially in competitive negotiations with relative strangers.Brer Rabbit had got himself caught by Brer Fox and was well on his way to becoming evening dinner.Brer Rabbit was in a great deal of deep trouble.There didn't seem much he could do about this one, but he didn't seem concerned at all at being the Fox's dinner.He just said, "Brer Fox I don't mind if you eat me.But, oh, whatever you do don't throw me in that briar patch."Now Brer Fox was surely looking forward to eating his old enemy, but he was mighty curious about Brer Rabbit's sweating and crying about being thrown into the briar patch.And the more he questioned it the more Brer Rabbit wailed about how much he hated and feared that briar patch.Pretty soon it did seem that Brer Rabbit would rather be eaten than be set among those briars.So Brer Fox threw Brer Rabbit into the heart of the briar patch.Brer Rabbit gleefully scampered away.From the tales of Brer Rabbit 1 NE of the greatest frustrations of applied ethics arises when seemingly flawless logic fails to convince practitioners to take the morally superior course of action.The great temptation is for the ethicist to write off the practitioners as somehow morally or mentally deficient.For their part, the practitioners are likely to regard the ethicist as naively idealistic.This tendency to talk past one another must be resisted if academic ethicists are to avoid what Annette Baier has called "that arrogance of solitary intellect which has condemned much of moral theory to sustained self-delusions concerning its subject matter, its methods, and its authority" (Baier, 1985, p. 244).This paper is written in an effort to move professional ethicists a notch closer to the world of practice.It uses a puzzle about a common form of deception in negotiation to stimulate the development of a perspective on morality that seems to be common in practice, but is underdeveloped in the literature of applied ethics.The deception that we are concerned with is illustrated in the story about Brer Rabbit, namely deception about one's settlement preferences.We choose this focus, not because we believe it to be one of the most pressing moral issues of the day, but because it is familiar to most readers, and it leads quite naturally to the perspective that we want to introduce in this paper.We call it the Mutual Trust perspective on morality.To understand the Mutual Trust perspective, it is useful to distinguish between ideal morality and morality in practice.Ideal morality determines the practices, rules, values, virtues, and so on that might be derived a priori from an abstract moral point of view.This is the morality that concerns most philosophical ethicists.Morality in practice, by contrast, takes into account the fact that we live in a morally imperfect, often competitive, sometimes unjust world.The Mutual Trust account of morality in practice tempers ideal morality with concerns about prudence, fair play, and effectiveness, offering a pragmatic approach to moral responsibility.According to the Mutual Trust view, moral obligations rest, at least in part, on a foundation of mutual trust.When that foundation of trust is absent, the obligation is undermined.Specifically, to take risky or imprudent action on the basis of moral ideals, when others cannot be trusted to do the same, may be admirable, but it goes beyond the obligations of morality in practice. 2 If we are correct that some form of the Mutual Trust perspective is widely accepted by practicing professionals and business people, the implications go far beyond the issue of deception about settlement O