Whistleblowing and Moral Luck
When we launch our whistleblowing projects, we’re sure we
are in the right. Sometimes the facts
are not entirely clear, but we are confident that we should make our
disclosures. We decide we are just doing
our jobs or what needs to be done. Often,
though, the morality of our act is determined by forces outside our control.
Bernard
Williams tells the
story of a man he calls Gauguin.
Gauguin got it into his head he wanted to be a great painter and the way
to do that was to leave his family and move to Tahiti. He clearly broke a moral rule by abandoning his
wife and children. Many would contend he
behaved unethically regardless of his ultimate artistic accomplishments. From Gauguin’s
perspective, if he succeeds, he might conclude his action was justified. If he fails, though, he has no defense
against his critics. The morality of his
act is measured, in part, based on the results of his efforts.
Whistleblowers are like Williams’ Gauguin. We clearly breach our duty to be loyal to employer
and peers when we blow the whistle on perceived misdeeds. Some people will always believe we could have
corrected the wrong in other ways. Our reputation
is highest when our accusations are proven accurate.
Although whistleblower protection laws seldom demand we
report actual violations, authorities favor the employers when our complaints are
unfounded. California
law is clear enough, for example, but in my case
the State accepted HomeFirst Services’
claim that legal bodies didn’t believe my accusations
of its misdeeds and judged
against me.
Unconcerned by future possibilities, many praise our desire to
do the right thing. But they ignore how intentions
are often corrupted by selfish motives. We
may seek revenge or hope to win some reward.
Our patience may have run out for a variety of reasons having nothing to
do with ethics. As Jonathon Haidt contends, highfalutin
morals are most often after-the-act rationalizations.
Williams argues that Gauguin’s stated intent cannot be sufficient
either. Otherwise any cockamamie idea would
justify the dreamer who ignores his proper obligations. What happens afterward is an important test.
According to Williams, our moral standing, like Gauguin’s,
depends on chance factors. This moral luck
comes in two forms. The first is
intrinsic to the actor: fortune bestows on us talents, circumstances, and past
experiences. Gauguin’s opportunity for
redemption after his boorish behavior depends on whether he really is an artistic
genius, something no one would know for years after his decision.
Some whistleblowers attribute their courage to personal histories. They point to long-held religious conviction,
upbringing, or training they chanced to have. But these histories diminish our individual
freedom more than they empower us to decide.
Iris Murdock
claimed the business of choosing is over by the time we have a choice to make. And C.
Frederick Alford described the “choiceless choice” of many whistleblowers. It’s a decision they felt forced to make: they
could not have lived with themselves if they stayed silent.
A second sort of luck is extrinsic. It involves future events that the individual
cannot control. If Gauguin’s ship were
to sink or if he were injured or sickened, and his project failed, we would
conclude he was wrong to have tried. We might
judge him still more harshly if he never caught the interest of a capable art dealer
and his paintings crumbed away in a sandy hut.
We whistleblowers like to think that our moral status is
immune to vagaries of luck. We throw Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Daniel
Hale, and Reality
Winner into the same moral pot. Each
revealed classified information the public deserved to know, we figure. But the quality of our disclosures – the vigor
of Snowden’s vs. the impotence of Winner’s, for example – does, and should,
have an impact on how we are considered.
Snowden referred to this retrospective evaluation when he described his
greatest fear: that his disclosures would have no impact.
The vast majority of whistleblowers and their disclosures are
met with indifference. It’s easy to feel
their complaints are nothing to get worked up about. Do we not know already that companies cut
corners and cheat their customers? That
nonprofits fleece their funders while accomplishing little of what they
promise? That officials withhold
information to protect the influence of their governments? And that religious ministers are more willing
to protect themselves and their institutions than their flocks?
The consequence of our ineffectiveness and others’ apathy to
our cause is we gain nothing to outweigh the wrong we commit at the start of
our projects.
Maybe that is okay. Whistleblowers
should be open to the prospect that our loss is not just the result of a
tactical error, power imbalance, or corruption in the opposing side. Losing may prove our moral failure: we may
have been ethically flawed from the beginning.
This is not to support anyone we perceive to be doing
wrong. And those who retaliate against
us are clearly sleazebags of the worst sort.
We can, though, find a kind of liberation in sloughing off
the cloak of assumed moral greatness. We
can stop reliving a battle lost times over.
We can stop defending our decisions that didn’t work out. Then we can live again and enter the next fight
fresh.
