Abstract
As levels of trust decrease and the necessity for trust increase in our society, we are increasingly driven toward the untoward, even disastrous, outcomes of the prisoner's dilemma. Yet despite the growing evidence that (re)building conditions of trust is increasingly mandatory in our era, modern moral philosophy (by default) and the social sciences (implicitly) legitimize an instrumental rationality which is the root problem. The greatest danger is that as conditions of trust are rationalized away through the progressive institutionalization of an instrumental rationality, we are driven towards the most virulent form of the prisoner's paradox — ethical relativism and its nihilistic consequences.
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Jonathan B. King is Associate Professor of Management at the College of Business at Oregon State University. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Antioch College (1965) and his M.B.A. in Finance (1975) and Ph.D. in Business, Government and Society (1980) from the University of Washington. His primary research interests are in the areas of moral philosophy and epistemology. His most important publications are ‘A Case for the Humanities Perspective’, Organizational Behavior Teaching Journal 1984; ‘The Three Faces of Thinking’, Journal of Higher Education (1986), and ‘Ethical Encounters of the Second Kind’, Journal of Business Ethics (1986).
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King, J.B. Prisoner's paradoxes. J Bus Ethics 7, 475–487 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00382594
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00382594