This essay offers a philosophical defense of deception about reservation prices in business negotiation. Its discussion is prompted by arguments that Charles N.C. Sherwood makes in a recent issue of Business Ethics Quarterly and develops ideas I put forward in an earlier issue of Business Ethics Quarterly. The essay argues that although reservation price deception cannot be justified by appeal to the consent of negotiating parties, it can be justified by appeal to a separate but related notion, assumption of risk, as long as the assumption of risk occurs in a suitably fair context.

At the center of our article “Citizenship, Inc.,” is a puzzle about a metaphor. Are corporations really a kind of citizen, or like citizens in some real way, or is talk of “corporate citizenship” all just a misleading metaphorical extension of the age-old concept of individual citizenship? In this reply to four very spirited responses to that article, we will not be defending our particular analysis of that metaphor so much as joining our colleagues in reflecting on the question of what academics are doing, or should be doing, when they take on the vocabulary of politics and business in this way. What can philosophers or social scientists expect to accomplish by telling fellow academics, or fellow citizens, that they should be using concepts like “corporate citizenship” one way rather than another? Is there a respectable methodology for shoring up this kind of advice? Or rather, are we all engaged in some kind of urbane political discourse attempting to push a vocabulary most likely to favor our own preferred ideological positions? We had relatively little to say on these questions in the original article, but we found many of the most interesting critiques or “friendly amendments” in the responses to be essentially about these “meta” and methodological questions (or derived from different answers to them).

Michael Rion’s The Responsible Manager provides a distinctive contribution to the field of business ethics. A short text written primarily for the business practitioner, it embodies the rare combination of focused attention to the context and practice of management as well as careful and thoughtful attention to distinctions and tools of ethical analysis. As such, it might serve as one of the most effective primers yet available for the practitioner who desires to benefit from the field of business ethics, without the jargon and flights to linguistic abstraction that characterize much of the academic field. As a resource for managers, teachers of managers and prospective managers the book avoids two pitfalls typical within the literature. It is superior to many texts written by academic theorists (e.g., philosophers) for whom ethics in business proceeds at high levels of theoretical abstraction and with little explicit attention to managerial practice and organizational context. It also succeeds where texts such as Ken Blanchard's The Power of Ethical Management fail—in being sensitive to management practice but lacking in ethical sophistication and theoretical clarity. Indeed, Michael Rion's academic training in ethics (Yale University) and his extensive experience in corporate practice both as resident corporate ethicist (Cummins Engine Company) and as external ethics consultant provide a unique combination rare to the field.

I feel that Professor Velasquez has written a very interesting and thought-provoking paper on an important topic. His initial identification with a “strong notion of the common good” (p. 1) raises the level of analysis to a high but very complex plane. The author introduces the interesting and, from my view, unusual realist objection in the Hobbsian form. After a rigorous analysis of this concept Professor Velasquez reaches what I find to be a disturbing conclusion: “It is not obvious that we can say that multinationals have an obligation to contribute to the global common good…” (p. 6). He then finishes t he paper with a strong plea for the establishment of “an international authority capable of forcing everyone to contribute toward the global good” (p. 6).

The claim that “everybody's doing it’ is not usually taken as a moral justification for an act that is otherwise immoral. Children frequently use this argument on their parents, without success. Business people sometimes try this argument, for instance, in claiming that since everyone else in a given country pays bribes, they are allowed to do so also. Abraham knew better than to use that argument on the Lord. He pleaded that Sodom and Gomorrah be spared if ten just men could be found there; not that anyone was just for doing what all the rest were doing.