Teaching Negotiation Ethics

Abstract

The teaching of negotiation ethics is not necessarily a happy endeavor. The black letter law of negotiation ethics leaves many instructors feeling unsettled because students find the take home lesson to be that deceit, misdirection, dissembling, and lying are “ethical.” If we simply focus on the black letter law without putting negotiations in a broader context of interpersonal interactions and procedural justice, we set our students up for hard lessons once they are in practice. This article presents several methods of helping professors teach negotiation ethics with greater depth and sensitivity, focusing on approaches that are more likely to resonate with students and instructors – even those instructors who have difficulty understanding what it is about routine bargaining that some find so troubling.

Keywords: ethics, negotiation, alternative dispute resolution, conflict resolution, ADR