Whistleblowing and Moral Luck

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.