Whistleblowing and Morality
Whistleblowers are moral warriors, some think. Lawyer-whistleblower Will
Kramer recently argued they often feel a powerful sense of moral
obligation. Myths that they are
motivated by money or they are just disgruntled employees are wrong, he wrote. But morality is tricky. Mostly
people call something right based less on moral reasoning than on moral
rationalization[1]. And whether an objection is honestly founded
on moral grounds can depend on your perspective.
The Easter-Passover season brings to mind an early
whistleblower: Judas
Iscariot. Judas followed Jesus of
Nazareth for a couple of years through the Judean desert. Jesus’ ideas grew increasingly at odds
with Jewish tradition, from which Judas and the other disciples came. While many early
followers quit him, Judas stayed on with some reservations. As their
finance guy, he complained, for example, that money spent on Jesus should be
used to assist
the poor.
According to familiar biblical reading[2],
Jewish leaders decided to arrest Jesus for violating their teachings, but they
needed an insider’s help. In exchange
for reward, Judas directed them to Jesus.
After the arrest, Judas was shunned and soon died. Although his name became synonymous with traitor,
his only sin may have been to defend what he considered a valued religious tradition.
This is a common whistleblower’s plight. We convince ourselves we are doing what’s right
for excellent, moral reasons, but others reject our belief.
Last month, Adrian
Lamo died. Lamo rose to fame
in the hacker community for authorized and unauthorized security tests of
various corporate computer networks.
His 2002 break into The
New York Times got him a two-year probation sentence and a $65,000 order for
restitution. He entered a difficult
period that included a psychiatric lockup and diagnosis for Asperger’s. Then in 2010 he and Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning had a
conversation. Manning confided having
downloaded 260,000 secret files and sending them to Wikileaks.
Lamo was no innocent.
Hacking and document theft didn’t bother him, per se. But he thought the leaks put lives at risk. So he turned Manning in to the FBI. He made a moral call. He blew the whistle on a soon-to-be-famous
whistleblower. For that he was treated
as most whistleblowers are: he
was vilified by supporters of Manning and Wikileaks. His tribe judged him a Judas for doing what
he thought was right.
Other whistleblowers also experience this: the people she
betrays claim they have greater value. The
State found harm, not good, in my whistleblowing
because it supposed HomeFirst really helped the homeless. Christians have the biggest problem with
Judas. And Lamo’s critics tend to find inherent
benefit in public disclosure of confidential documents. When Sherron Watkins brought
down Enron, she was heroic because Enron was by that time regarded as
scum.
Another who turned against his clan was Christopher Wylie. Wylie worked
at Cambridge Analytica for about a year ending in 2014. A data guy, for years he was OK with using
Facebook data for political research and psychological
profiling. CA got funding from major
Republican
donor Robert
Mercer and was co-founded
by Steve Bannon. It supported many conservative
political campaigns. Wylie was fine with
that, too, at the time. CA’s clients included
Ted
Cruz in 2014, maybe Brexit
supporters, and then Trump
in 2016.
Like Lamo, what pushed Wylie over the edge was not the work
itself. He didn’t mind grabbing personal
information from 87
million people. What
bothered Wylie was its outcome: Trump won.
CA’s immorality became evident to him years after he left the company. Only then did he conclude it was undermining
democracy. His come-lately approach
to whistleblowing, however, has drawn criticism
from Slate and others.
These whistleblowers are connected by two threads in
their projects. First comes the terrible
difficulty in teasing out what is morally correct. Our complaints can be technical and hard to understand. Whether we act honorably for the right
reasons is always subject to doubt.
We necessarily offend one morality when we defend another. One’s judgment on Judas is biased by her feelings
toward Jesus. Even a case as seemingly
clear as Watkins’s becomes ambiguous when the thousands of innocent employees
at Enron and Arthur
Anderson, who lost their jobs, are considered.
Second, a whistleblower’s history provides ready ammunition
for her attackers. Judas is reviled as a
traitor because he voluntarily followed Jesus for years. Lamo received scorn because he was once a
lauded hacker and his background led Manning to approach him. Wylie is maligned because he happily made
money on the business he now exposes.
At HomeFirst, I was CFO for seven years, and some of its problems began years before I disclosed them.
My career made me disingenuous, HomeFirst
contended, not a true whistleblower.
The State
labor commission agreed with the company: I was a traitor trying to bring it
down. A Judas, I was not acting in good
faith, it wrote.
Each of us emerges from a past that endangers us.
So we whistleblowers usually lose. That’s no reason to be silent. Sometimes we’re so upset about our situation,
we need to act. It’s just a warning about
what will probably happen when we do.
[1] Greene, Joshua D. “The Secret Joke of Kant’s
Soul.” In Moral Psychology: The Neuroscience of
Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development (Volume 3). W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.). Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2008. 35–80
[2] In
one
alternative reading, Jesus was a rebel who challenged the Roman order. The Romans, who eventually crucified him, had
good reason and authority, which the Jewish leaders lacked, to execute him. See also
this.
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