Whistleblowing, Clean and Messy

Whistleblowing, Clean and Messy

In his NY Times column, The Ethicist, Kwame Anthony Appiah responds to ethical questions posed by readers.  In a recent issue, a middle school student asked about becoming a whistleblower.

During a test the student witnessed three fellow students cheating while their teacher was out of the room.  He[1] wanted to be honest but also feared the consequences of reporting the violation – to the three cheaters and his friendship with them.  His school has no official honor code.

This seems to be the typical whistleblower’s dilemma.  An honorable person sees misbehavior and must weigh the personal consequences of disclosing it to authorities against the social benefit produced by disclosure. 

It is the problem cleansed of emotion that academics have addressed for years[2].  Here the individual has time to consider the issues and seek advice from wise people.  The significance of the wrong can be evaluated objectively, which Appiah does.

Appiah, commends the student for his values and suggests that cheaters eventually pay for their dishonesty.  He agrees that the student has no moral obligation to report the incident and the personal effect of reporting could be painful.  He does not point out, but readers understand, the misbehavior is not really egregious.   He may stay silent.  To soothe his conscience, the student could write his principal a letter recommending teachers not leave test sites without monitors.

Appiah might also have counseled me against ratting on HomeFirst.  I might have heeded his caution that the personal ramifications would be significant.  I was probably going to retire about a year after I started pushing the violations I found.  I could have used that time, if I really wanted to file complaints, to gather proof to support my claims.  He might have mentioned HomeFirst’s violations were not time-sensitive and probably not all that significant.  I was, after all, just a small-time whistleblower.

Moral judgments form not in a reasonable head but out of emotion[3].  Likewise, whistleblowing cases are dirtied by emotions on both sides.  If the student had been bullied by the three cheats earlier, he might never have sent Appiah his letter.  He might have decided he’d found the opportunity he was looking for.

Companies usually claim the whistleblower is unclean.  He is disgruntled and sullied by poor performance.  HomeFirst’s response to my complaint also said I wanted to bring the company down by blowing the whistle.  The State’s determination letter accepted HomeFirst’s claim: I did not act based on good faith belief.  I did not perform in the company’s interest.

You can suspect that destructive desire in some big-time whistleblowers.  Sometimes the perceived violation seems so enormous the organization must be torn down before things can be righted.  Enron and WorldCom rightly fell to ashes.  Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden hoped to upset broad swaths of government.

In my case, and I suspect many others’, what sparked whistleblowing was ire directed not at the company, but at one particular person.  Company misbehavior provided a context, but my whistleblowing would not have happened without that special person.

Jenny Niklaus arrived after we had reduced the number of employees by 40% trying to put HomeFirst on a solid financial footing.  She appeared to be the best of three CEO candidates.  She was bubbly and cried at the plight of homeless people. 

In 2010, Niklaus’ first full year as CEO, HomeFirst lost $1.8 million (before gains on the sale of assets).  I suggested we’d have to trim more expenses, but we didn’t.  It lost $.4 million in 2011, $1.1 million in 2012  and $1.6 million in 2013.  Donor contributions continued to drop.  I said more firmly we needed to cut expenses.  We had nasty exchanges over the 2014 budget when I again recommended cuts without effect.  I said we could run out of cash, but she was unmoved.  A former development director reminded me, she’s an idiot, you know.

I thought I would win as the company’s financial position visibly worsened.  When violations started piling up, I expected I would surely win.  I thought, wrongly, the board would fire her, not me.

Her laziness annoyed me.  She was inept and frustrated me.  She refused to fix anything; she pissed me off.  She inspired my whistleblowing when I witnessed HomeFirst’s violations.  That’s the way I see it.

It’s hard to be sure my sense of how people become whistleblowers – our unhappiness opens us to report misdeeds when we observe them – is generally true.  It seems to describe how Debra Halbrook was launched after she was offended by her boss.

Then there’s Francisco Alsonso, a West Palm Beach (FL) police lieutenant.  He started blowing the whistle after he was reprimanded for not stopping a fellow officer from driving while intoxicated.  Ann Tarafas and Elizabeth Fox worked as paraprofessionals in a financially troubled Pennsylvania charter school.  They didn’t like cuts and reassignments the principal made, so they complained.  Dr. Julian Craig, a former chief medical officer, had a gripe over his pay on the way to testifying to District of Columbia lawmakers about the hospital’s problems.

Ethicists have suggested that whistleblowers should be pure of heart and resist desire for revenge[4].  But employment-at-will ended company loyalty as reason for hesitating to blow the whistle.  Then government-sponsored rewards for reporters quashed assumptions about our pure hearts.

The new world is messy.  We report perceived wrongs with much or little pause.  We blow our whistles on a variety of sites.  Damning documents are uploaded.  Complaints fly over Facebook, blogs, and tweets.  Criticisms posted on Yelp, Trip Advisor, and any number of other media routinely call out our disappointments.

The realm of Appiah’s innocent student is attractive but not easily located.

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[1] The sex of the student was not stated.

[2] See, for example, Hoffman, Michael W. and Mark S. Schwartz.  “The Morality of Whistleblowing: A Commentary on Richard T. De George.”  Journal of Business Ethics 127 (2015):771-781; and Bok, Sisella. “Whistleblowing and Professional Responsibility.” New York University Education Quarterly 11.4 (1980): 2-10

[3] Haidt, Jonathan. “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.”  Psychological Review 108.4 (2001): 814-834

[4] Bouville, Mathieu.  “Whistle-blowing and morality.”  Journal of Business Ethics.  81.3 (September 2008): 579-585; Hoffman and Schwartz, ibid;  Bok, ibid.