Truthfulness and Business

According to a common assumption, truthfulness cannot have an intrinsic value in business. Instead, it is considered only instrumentally valuable for business, because it contributes to successful trust-building. Some authors deny truthfulness even this limited role by claiming that truth-telling is not an essential part of business, which is a sui generis practice like poker. In this article, I argue that truthfulness has indeed an intrinsic value in business and identify the conceptual confusions underlying the opposite view. My account of truthfulness as a virtue shows that truthfulness is both valuable for its own sake and instrumental to further valuable goals. It helps pinpoint the implicit contradiction in claiming that truthfulness has an instrumental value only. I then challenge the reasons for considering business exempt from the constraints of truthfulness and elaborate on the analogy between game and business, which in fact supports instead of undermining my claim that business is a truthful practice. Finally, I illustrate my argument with a case study of the current crisis of trust faced by the pharmaceutical industry. Lubomira Radoilska, PhD., is an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, Cambridge University and a Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. Dr Radoilska received her Masters degree in Philosophy from Sofia University and her MPhil and Doctorate from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her research interests fall within the scope of moral philosophy. She has published articles on both theoretical and applied topics.