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 all questions we face regularly in both our careers and our personal lives, and yet there is little discussion of them in ethical terms: what is right, fair, morally acceptable. Drawing on 30 years of experience in business negotiation, Charles Sherwood sets out to answer these questions.

Through a combination of philosophical rigour, provocative thought experiments, and applied real-life business situations he has developed 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 rather in the negotiating process itself. Moreover, he argues that this makes for better outcomes for all parties.

A Fair Bargain: The Ethics of Negotiation is therefore a work of moral philosophy, but one aimed at answering some quite pressing practical questions. It is essential reading for students of business ethics, practitioners, and all those with an interest in creating a fair process for negotiation in business and in life.