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          

Suggested Readings

C. Fred Alford. “Whistleblowers and the Narrative of Ethics.” Journal of Social Philosophy 32 (Fall 2001).  

Thomas L. Carson. “Conflicts of Interest.” Journal of Business Ethics (May 1994). 

G. P. Fletcher. Loyalty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Mike W. Martin. “Whistleblowing.” Business and Professional Ethics Journal 11 (Summer 1992).

“Moral Call Led GI Whistleblower.” CBS News, August 19, 2004. 

“Praise for Iraq Whistleblower.” CBS News, May 11, 2004. 

Josiah Royce. The Philosophy of Loyalty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908.

Brian Schrag. “The Moral Significance of Employee Loyalty.” Business Ethics Quarterly 11 (January 2001).

 

Websites

Visit the National Whistleblowers Center at www.whistleblowers.org and the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition at www.nswbc.org

Read about military whistle-blowing and the Military Whistleblowers Protection Act at http://www.uscg.mil/legal/militarywhistlerblowerprotectionact.asp and in a Time article at http://nation.time.com/2011/10/20/why-military-whistleblowers-fear-reprisal/

Read about another military whistle-blower discussed in the Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/16/bradley-manning-americans-support

Read about legal protections for whistle-blowers at http://www.whistleblowers.gov/

Learn about ways to submit a confidential tip to a news outlet at https://www.nytimes.com/tips

Read another take on why people cheat at http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/us/why-cheat

Catch up with Sherron Watkins at her own website, http://sherronwatkins.com, or read a more critical version of her story at http://www.forbes.com/2002/02/14/0214watkins.html

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