Member-only story
Cheating’s not okay… right?
The flop
I distinctly remember a particular ‘case’ at Harvard Business School. The task for my class (‘section’) that day was to debate whether cheating in business was okay.
The “cheating-is-cool” side of the argument amounted to an “everybody’s-doing-it” rationale. This justification could have been easily and rightly dismissed by every person’s mother. But because it was an Ivy-League graduate program, this side of the debate was instead anointed in our pre-reading via an obtuse poker comparison and concomitant contortions. [1]
In short, the idea was as follows:
(a) business resembles a game,
(b) poker is unmistakably a game,
(c) everyone bluffs in poker,
(d) if you don’t bluff in poker, you’ll lose,
(e) you can’t play poker to lose,
(f) so you should bluff, too, or just not play,
(g) generalizing ‘f’: bluffing is dishonest but necessary in games,
(h) everyone who plays games realizes that dishonesty is part of the game, so
(i) dishonesty must be ethical within games,
