Is Whistleblowing a Duty?

Emanuela Ceva, Michele Bocchiola

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509529667, 9781509529650
• eBook ISBN: 9781509529681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Recent years have seen a number of whistleblowers risk their liberty to expose illegal and corrupt behaviour. Some have heralded their bravery; others see them as traitors. Can there be a moral duty to emulate their example and blow the whistle?

In this book, leading political philosophers Emanuela Ceva and Michele Bocchiola draw on well-known cases, such as those of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, to probe the difference between permissible and dutiful whistleblowing. They argue that, insofar as whistleblowing is understood as an individual act of dissent, it falls short of constituting a duty, although it can be praiseworthy. Whistleblowing should, they contend, be seen as an institutional duty, embedded within the organizational practices of public accountability.

This concise book will be invaluable for students and scholars of applied political theory, and political and professional ethics.

1
Defining Whistleblowing

Introduction

In a basic sense, whistleblowing consists in the practice of reporting wrongdoings. The term entered the public debate in the late 1950s, but, despite the growing discussion of this practice in academic as well as non-academic circles, no definition is generally accepted.¹ Formulating a definition capable of being precise enough to serve the purposes of academic research and nuanced enough to encompass the many current usages of the term in the public debate is a challenge for a number of reasons.

First of all, ‘whistleblowing’ is a metaphor: like the referee who, literally, blows the whistle to stop the action when players commit a foul during a game, whistleblowers signal that something (potentially) wrong is occurring (Bok, 1980, p. 2). As with many other figures of speech, when the metaphor of whistleblowing is applied to a complex set of different actions, its literal meaning becomes vague and imprecise. Although it may actually be suggestive of the emotions involved in the practice – the imperative need to bring an illegal or hazardous behaviour to a halt – a metaphor of this sort is unfit for providing either a precise definition or an encompassing account of whistleblowing.

A second difficulty comes from the fact that the current usages of the term ‘whistleblowing’ neither extensionally refer to a coherent set of actions nor intentionally track a distinctive category in the realm of practical normativity under which all relevant actions can be subsumed. Unlike purely philosophical concepts, ‘whistleblowing’ has so far been used as a semantic placeholder for a set of similar (although not homogeneous) practices that typically involve someone’s reporting an alleged wrongdoing to someone else.

Related to this conceptual point, a normative issue applies too. The moral appreciation, social approval, and general normative evaluation of this practice have varied across different historical, cultural, and social contexts.² When it entered the public debate, ‘whistleblowing’ was used by journalists to characterize the action of professionals reporting such hazards as weaknesses or errors in an artefact’s design with the intent of preventing a threat to customers’ safety (see, for example, De George, 1981). Nowadays, ‘whistleblowing’ has entered common parlance as a way of describing the public exposure of episodes of corruption, fraud, or general abuses of power. Across all these usages, the term has been characteristically laden with an ambivalent connotation, swinging between the appreciation for a heroic act of denunciation and the suspicion – if not the condemnation – of a revelation that entails a breach of confidentiality akin to espionage.

A third difficulty comes from the distinctively multidisciplinary attention whistleblowing has attracted. The study of whistleblowing has been central for quite some time in legal theory (e.g., labour and corporate law), economics (e.g., business management and administration), and business ethics. This variety of approaches has resulted in a plurality of definitions that are difficult to reconcile in one unified and systematic view.³

This difficulty emerges quite strikingly from a general survey of the main theories in the debate. Richard De George (1981, 2010), whose work is considered a benchmark in business ethics, takes whistleblowing as the action of disclosing information about the possible harm caused by a certain product. Sissela Bok (1980) extends De George’s view to general revelations made in the public interest of a society and presents whistleblowing as a preventive measure.⁴ Norman Bowie (1982, pp. 142–8) adds violation of human rights as a reason that motivates whistleblowing. More recently, as attention to whistleblowing has increased, scholars have tried to work out more nuanced definitions of this practice – notably, some have insisted on the central significance of information concerning illegalities and other serious wrongdoings voluntarily disclosed by the members of an organization.⁵

This plethora of accounts and evaluative stances has made it particularly difficult to pinpoint the conceptual and normative essence of whistleblowing and is responsible for a blurring of the lines between this practice and such other potentially troublesome activities as spying on, or informing on, somebody.⁶

To avoid losing content and meaning, our primary aim in this chapter is to propose a working definition of whistleblowing that meets the following desiderata: (a) it captures the many salient features of the specific way of reporting wrongdoings that this practice implies; (b) it is sufficiently robust to hold across different disciplines and current usages of the term; (c) it is sufficiently normatively thin to avoid including any moral or political judgement in the description of the practice.

Let us start from this general and minimal definition:

WHISTLEBLOWING: the practice through which a member of a legitimate organization voluntarily reports some wrongdoing, allegedly occurring within that organization, with the intention that corrective action should be taken to address it.⁷

We now elaborate on the constitutive elements of this definition in detail. This elaboration will guide us through the famous cases of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning in the section after the next.

Six Elements of Whistleblowing

Our working definition of the practice of whistle-blowing contains six main elements regarding (i) the action of reporting (either authorized or unauthorized); (ii) the agent of the report (the whistleblower); (iii) the locus where the relevant facts occur (an organization); (iv) the object of the report (the wrongdoing); (v) the addressee of the report (either internal or external to the organization); and (vi) the motivation of the report (the intention to initiate a corrective action). Let us review each of these elements in turn.

(i) The action

In a basic and straightforward sense, the practice of whistleblowing consists in an action of reporting. But not just any act of reporting is an instance of whistleblowing. How does this action specifically qualify?

First of all, whistleblowing consists in a voluntary disclosure. This implies that a whistleblower does not typically act under duress – she is not revealing the occurrence of some wrongdoing under the threat or the use of force by a third party.⁸ Whatever the justificatory grounds for reporting wrongdoings could possibly be, whistleblowing is not usually driven by the need to overcome the risk of physical force or psychological and social pressure.

Different commentators have pointed out different features of this voluntary act of reporting, concerning, for instance, its anonymity. We wish to be quite inclusive in our account, and, therefore, we recognize that the action of blowing the whistle could take the form of either an open or an anonymous report, depending on the specific environmental circumstances in which it occurs. Open reports are usually considered an act of indictment – that is, a manifest accusation of some wrongdoing (see Jubb, 1999). Anonymous reports, instead, are similar to ‘tips’ (pieces of information, typically given in a confidential way) or ‘leaks’ (the intentional disclosure of secret information).⁹

In addition, we can distinguish between authorized and unauthorized reports, depending on the current legislation and local norms. Reports filed through authorized forms of whistleblowing are presented through legally or otherwise established organizational procedures. Unauthorized disclosures, like tips and leaks, are typically unlawful activities (e.g., when confidential pieces of information are reported to the press). Independently of their formal legal status, all actions of whistleblowing can be ethically problematic, as we shall see in chapter 3.

(ii) The agent

The second element to consider is the agent who blows the whistle. A whistleblower is a member of the organization in which the reported facts occur. So not just anyone who files a report on some questionable organizational practices or individual behaviour counts as a whistleblower. The report characteristically comes from the inside (Miceli and Near, 1992; Miceli et al., 2014).¹⁰

To be a member of an organization means to occupy a role within it, or, to put it differently, to perform a formal and regulated function that is coordinated with those assigned to other members. In this sense, possible whistleblowers include a company’s employees, the officer of a public institution, a volunteer in a charity organization, and so on. Membership is not necessarily permanent; those who take part in the formal activities of an organization for a limited period of time may also qualify as whistleblowers. This could be the case with temporary workers or members of another organization currently working within the organization in which the relevant facts occur (these may be either subcontractors or consultants).

Not quite as straightforward a matter is whether both present and past members of an organization qualify. In the comprehensive spirit of our definition, we wish to include both kinds of members. However, when specific cases are under scrutiny, the temporal proximity or distance from the relevant facts may make a difference for assessing the whistleblower’s action (depending, for example, on the reasons why the agent has decided to defer her report).

In either case, this membership requirement is crucial to distinguish the practice of whistleblowing as a particular way of reporting, irreducible to other frequently debated practices. This feature marks the difference, for example, between a whistleblower and either a ‘spy’ or a ‘rat’. A spy is someone who collects informatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Defining Whistleblowing
• 2 The Practice of Whistleblowing as a Duty
• 3 Whistleblowing: Personal Trust, Secrecy, and Public Accountability
• Conclusion
• References