Business should become serious about words such as “integrity” or abandon high-minded pretense. Scholars and managers alike are confused by two language games, one of efficiency and the other of deep values. Each set of linguistic rules refuses translation into the other. Scholars patch stakeholder interests into optimization strategies even as managers patch heroic mission statements into profit targets. All current attempts to escape the trap, multilingual approaches, values-as-preferences approaches, and surrogacy approaches, fall short. The way forward is to focus on the acting agent, whether individual or corporate, and making the agent’s choices subject to the constraints of practical reason. Approaching the problem through the door of practical reasoning and a pattern of practical inference promises to integrate the languages of efficiency and values into a single-flow model while at the same time avoiding the steep requirement of inter-translatability.