Deception and Mutual Trust: A Reply to Strudler

Alan Strudler has written a stimulating and provocative article about deception in negotiation. He presents his views, in part, in con trast with our earlier work on the Mutual Trust Perspective. We believe that Strudler is wrong in his account of the ethics of deception in negotiation and in his quick dismissal of the Mutual Trust Perspective. Though his mistakes may be informative, his views are potentially harmful to business practice. In this paper, we present arguments against Strudler's position and attempt to salvage the Mutual-Trust Perspective from his attack. Strudler's work reaffirms the need for a more pragmatic approach to business ethics. We close the paper with a renewed call for more constructive and practical approaches to business ethics research. eception in negotiation has long been an intriguing topic for business ethicists. Strudler has added to the intrigue by proposing what for many ethicists will seem to be a counter-intuitive view: that some forms of deception in business negotiation are morally neutral or even benign. Strudler's approach is not simply a reaffirmation of Albert Carr's thesis (1968) that business has its own ethics. Rather, Strudler offers a novel analysis of negotiation tactics. In presenting his views, Strudler follows a time-honored tradition of an author preparing readers for his own views by first purporting to uncover fatal flaws in alternative theories. Since the reader does not have the earlier work freshly in mind or readily at hand, the author's characterization of the earlier theory is decisive. Readers end up believing that anyone with an ounce of moral decency could not have seriously put forward the earlier theory and conclude any new theory would be an improvement. Having lowered the bar, the author, in this case Strudler, jumps over it with apparent ease. Since we have the distinction of being Strudler's first victims, we have taken a special interest in his paper. Strudler casts our `'Mutual Trust Perspective" (sees and Cramton, 1991) as a kind of Dr. Jeckyll/Mr. Hyde theory. On one hand, he portrays us as uptight prudes who cluck moral disapproval over something as trivial as the deceptions engaged in by a Madrid taxi driver hoping to extract an extra commission for carrying heavy boxes. On the dark side, Strudler describes us as wild-men who would cheer-on violent, paranoid software entrepreneurs looking to beat the living daylights out of one another in order to gain trade secrets. Naturally, we believe that he has got us wrong. We also think that his theory is fatally flawed, even harmful. However, we will resist the temptation to respond with a caricature of Strudler's work. Such a strategy is not likely to be effective in this case since readers of this journal probably have Strudler's views freshly in mind and, if not, could easily check our claims by turning a few pages. The principle of self-defense may justify an unfair counter-attack, but the context prohibits it. Strudler was not the first to raise questions about our work (see Boatright 1992, Gibson 1994), but he is the most aggressive in his critique. We are flattered by the attention, but disappointed that our arguments have not been universally compelling. While the critical response has convinced us that we need to be clearer about our claims and that we could improve on our earlier work, our central convictions remain unshaken. In response to Strudler's paper, we will explain why deception is a morally regrettable feature of business negotiations, and why the Mutual Trust Perspective is a reasonable working hypothesis.