For those who, like myself, are enthusiastic advocates of normativelydriven empirical studies of business ethics and values, a display of expert knowledge concerning methods of the sort we see here is occasion for large measures of professional satisfaction. With all of their imperfections and qualifications, all of the tentativeness attached to the truths they yield, these methods (and similar others not included here) open vistas not accessible by other modes of inquiry. For these gains, scholars everywhere should be grateful.

Yet, questions nag at the back of one's mind, even as the positive accomplishments are registered.

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.

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.

We consider the problem of moral disjunction in professional and business activities from a virtue-ethical perspective. Moral disjunction arises when the behavioral demands of a role conflict with personal morality; it is an important problem because most people in modern societies occupy several complex roles that can cause this clash to occur. We argue that moral disjunction, and the psychological mechanisms that people use to cope with it, are problematic because they make it hard to pursue virtue and to live with integrity. We present role coadunation as a process with epistemic and behavioral aspects that people can use to resolve moral disjunction with integrity. When role coadunation is successful, it enables people to live virtuous lives of appropriate narrative disunity and to honor their identity-conferring commitments. We show how role coadunation can be facilitated by interpretive communities and discuss the emergence and ideal features of those communities.

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.