Chapter 9 Summary

One of the most unpleasant moral duties facing a loyal employee is that of “blowing the whistle”: letting others outside your organization know when an immoral or otherwise harmful or seriously undesirable practice is being conducted within your organization. And whistle-blowers generally face harsh consequences for their actions. This chapter deals with the questions of when, why, and even how one should blow the whistle.

Frederick Bruce Bird begins the chapter with a discussion of moral muteness (the failure to speak up about matters one knows to be wrong), and the factors that can increase its prevalence in the workplace.

Sissela Bok explains the nature of whistle-blowing and gives an outline of its moral importance and difficulty. She also offers some guidelines for how to blow the whistle in a morally responsible fashion.

Ronald Duska argues that whistle-blowing presents no real moral conflicts, because a company is not the sort of thing to which one can owe loyalty. The conflict is simply between what the whistle-blower owes his society (when he knows the company is harming it) and what he owes himself (when he can reasonably expect reprisal for blowing the whistle).

David E. Soles follows up Duska’s line of inquiry by analyzing what counts as loyalty and the grounds of one’s being loyal. He offers four different concepts of loyalty—the idealist account, the common sense account, the “loyalty as a norm” account, and the minimalist account—and concludes that one’s moral duty to one’s company (and other objects of loyalty) will vary according to the particular concept of loyalty you adopt.

By the close of Chapter 9, you should:

Understand the concepts of loyalty and whistle-blowing
Understand some of the factors that make it difficult for people to speak up about morally troubling matters in the workplace
Understand why there may be a moral imperative to blow the whistle
Understand the relationship between secrecy and loyalty
Understand why a company may or may not be an object of loyalty

Chapter 9 Summary

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