Assessing the integrity of Carr’s argument is something akin to standing under a circus tent after a torrential storm. The view is capacious and colorful, but the sagging is evident, the stakes untethered, and the overall impression it makes is of something not entirely stable. It’s the type of popular work prim-faced PhDs routinely disregard as the specious currency of common sense, which is one reason it is a little surprising the essay became a touchstone for an ongoing debate in scholarly journals about the moral permissibility of lying in business. If these papers are assembled from the sturdier timber of academic argument, it’s notable that they never really challenge the principal observation and tenable opinion of Carr’s essay: “All sensible businessmen prefer to be truthful, but they seldom feel inclined to tell the whole truth.” Instead, these scholarly works merely gussy up the sentiment so that it becomes a sanction for anything other than lying.
In this respect, the contrast with Carr is refreshing. He never wavers from what, for him, is essentially a commonplace: to be successful in business, one needs a liberal approach to truth telling.
The spirit of that approach is well captured by the title of the book from which Carr adapted his essay, Business as a Game. Rather than a lawless realm where all is permitted, business is a contest of sorts with rules of its own beyond those of the public square. The competition Carr prefers by analogy is poker. He writes:
Poker’s own brand of ethics is different from the ethical ideals of civilized human relationships. The game calls for distrust of the other fellow. It ignores the claim of friendship. Cunning deception and concealment of one’s strength and intentions, not kindness and openheartedness, are vital in poker. No one thinks any the worse of poker on that account. And no one should think any the worse of the game of business because its standards of right and wrong differ from the prevailing traditions of morality in our society.
Carr’s analogy is a warrant for a certain level of acceptable deception in business, and I was curious to know what present-day business professionals made of it, so I emailed a few of the students who have taken my Business Ethics class at Booth to see if they would share their impressions. On the whole, most of them signaled significant discomfort with the width of Carr’s net, but they didn’t object to him casting it. “As I think about whether lying in business is ethical, I found myself coming back to the answer that I frequently came to in class,” one student confessed: “It depends.”
If some amount of duplicity is simply a staple of the business profession, according to my students, two species of deception seem especially prevalent. The first is an inclination to exaggerate, especially when it comes to closing a deal. When pitching investment opportunities, one student told me, people “feel entitled to exaggerate because disclaimers like ‘Past performance is not a guarantor of future performance’ are always there.” This conviction, she noted, was fairly common among her fellow students. “Exaggeration is understood as particularly important in [venture capital] and the startup world,” she explained, “where people really are investing huge amounts of money and time in unproven ideas.”
The inclination to exaggerate is made more hazardous by a second category of acceptable deception: careful omission. As this second student described it in her email, the real “danger” in dealmaking is when the man on the make exaggerates the upside of a venture and potential clients do not ask the right types of questions. “There is no technical lying involved,” she said, but divulging the whole truth would certainly put the deal at risk.