When is it acceptable to lie? The ethics of negotiation
LSEHoughton Street
Thu 3 Dec · 18:30 · Free
About this event
When negotiating, is it acceptable to lie? What about lying just a bit? Don’t we at least have a right to lie about the highest price we are prepared to pay, or the lowest we are prepared to accept? And in negotiations, to what extent are we obliged to consider the outcome for the ‘other side’? Is it acceptable to exploit another’s extreme vulnerability to ‘drive a hard bargain’? These are questions we face regularly in careers and personal lives, and yet there is little discussion of them in ethical terms: what is right, fair, morally acceptable. In his new book, A Fair Bargain: The Ethics of Negotiation , which our speakers will discuss at this event, Charles Sherwood sets out to answer these questions. Through philosophical rigour, provocative thought experiments, and applied real-life business situations, Sherwood develops a theory of negotiation as a social construct, designed to promote cooperative behaviour based on mutual consent. In doing so, he locates the fairness of a negotiation not in some abstract, objectively fair, single solution, but in the negotiating process itself.
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A different kind of night
Not the same tradition as the lineage above — a genuinely different thread to pull, if you want one.