When two ‘wrongs’ make a right: An essay on business ethics

@article{Kavka1983WhenT,
  title={When two ‘wrongs’ make a right: An essay on business ethics},
  author={Gregory S. Kavka},
  journal={Journal of Business Ethics},
  year={1983},
  volume={2},
  pages={61-66}
}
Sometimes two wrongs do make a right. That is, others' violations of moral rules may make it permissible for one to also violate these rules, to avoid being unfairly disadvantaged. This claim, originally advanced by Hobbes, is applied to three cases in business. It is suggested that the claim is one source of scepticism concerning business ethics. I argue, however, that the conditions under which business competitors' violations of moral rules would render one's own violations permissible are… 
View on Springer
15 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
1
Background Citations
6

15 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

Defining ‘business ethics’: Like nailing jello to a wall
Business ethics is a topic receiving much attention in the literature. However, the term ‘business ethics’ is not adequately defined. Typical definitions refer to the rightness or wrongness of…
Google, Human Rights, and Moral Compromise
International business faces a host of difficult moral conflicts. It is tempting to think that these conflicts can be morally resolved if we gained full knowledge of the situations, were rational…
Shrewd Bargaining on the Moral Frontier: Toward a Theory of Morality in Pratice
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…
Shrewd Bargaining on the Moral Frontier: Toward a Theory of Morality In Practice
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…
Morality in Practice: Dees, Crampton, and Brer Rabbit On a Problem of Applied Ethics
In their article, “Shrewd Bargaining on the Moral Frontier,” J. Gregory Dees and Peter C. Crampton challenge us with a puzzle about deception in bargaining. How can the practice of misleading others…
Business Ethics: An Overview
This essay provides an overview of business ethics. I describe important issues, identify some of the normative considerations animating them, and offer a roadmap of references for those wishing to…
Believing that everyone else is less ethical: Implications for work behavior and ethics instruction
Studies consistently report that individuals believe they are far more ethical than co-workers, superiors, or managers in other firms. The present study confirms this finding when comparing…
Bluffing and Deception
Deception can be defined as intentionally causing someone to have false beliefs. Bluffing in negotiations involves attempting to deceive others about one's intentions or negotiating position. In the…
To Pay or Not to Pay? Business Owners’ Tax Morale: Testing a Neo-Institutional Framework in a Transition Environment
In order to understand how the environment influences business owner/managers’ attitudes towards tax morale, we build a theoretical model based on a neo-institutionalist framework. Our model combines…
Hume’s Game-Theoretic Business Ethics
In recent years, a number of authors have used game- theoretic reasoning to explain why purely self-interested agents would ever conform their economic activities with the requirements of justice,…
...
1
2
...