Whistle-blowing and Third Party Obligations

The implied contract of employment: The traditional law of agency places the employee under a legal obligation to act loyally and in good faith and to carry out all lawful instructions. Loyalty, however, cannot be blind.

James Roche: Some critics are now busy eroding another support of free enterprise—the loyalty of a management team, with its unifying values and cooperative work. Some of the enemies of business now encourage an employee to be disloyal to the enterprise. They want to create suspicion and disharmony, and pry into the proprietary interests of the business. How ever this is labeled—industrial espionage, whistle blowing, or professional responsibility—it is another tactic for spreading disunity and creating conflict.

Ronald Duska is suspicious of such loyalty. What kind of objects can we be loyal to? 1) Idealists believe that loyalty is devotion to something more than just persons, but to some cause or abstract entity. 2) Social atomists believe that we can only be loyal to individual persons and that such feelings of loyalty are not basic feelings at all-- they are explainable in other terms. 3) A moderate position: idealists go too far in positing some abstract ideal, and the atomists reduce things too far as well. Loyalty is a real relation that holds between people or groups of people.

What binds people together in business is not sufficient to require loyalty. Two functions of business: 1)provide a good or service, 2)make a profit. Loyalty has no place here.

Conflicts of Interest: Why do you refer a patient to this particular specialist? This can be sticky. Be aware! We must always have the best interests of the patient in mind FIRST. What about retailing? Gifts and Entertainment: What issues do you see here? Sales reps? Gifts for using products? I know this is common in the MD world, what about dentistry?

Whistleblowing: Distinctions and definitions Internal vs. external whistle-blowing: Internal: follows a formal, prescribed company policy for bringing to the attention of upper level management potentially wrongful actions by the firm which could endanger the public. External: discloses information of organizational wrongdoing to outside sources. The employee might have begun the process internally, then, in the absence of action, went public.

Possible conditions for legitimate whistle-blowing (Norman Bowie): 1)the act stems from appropriate moral motives of preventing unnecessary harm to others; 2)the whistleblower uses all available internal procedures for rectifying the problematic behavior before public disclosure (except when special circumstances preclude this); 3)the whistleblower has evidence that would persuade a reasonable person; 4)the whistleblower acts in accordance with his or her responsibilities for avoiding/exposing moral violations; 5)the whistleblower does not see monetary gain as a result of his or her actions; and 6)the whistleblower’s action has some reasonable chances of success.

Deborah Johnson: 1)An individual performs an action or a series of actions intended to make information public; 2)the information is made a matter of public record; 3)the information is about possible or actual nontrivial wrongdoing in an organization.

Possible conditions for permissible whistle-blowing (R.T. DeGeorge): 1)a practice or product does or will cause serious harm to individuals or society at large; 2)the charge of wrongdoing has been brought to the attention of immediate supervisors; 3)no appropriate action has been taken to remedy the wrongdoing. If we add to these three conditions the following two, then the whistle- blowing becomes increasingly obligatory rather than permissible: 4) there is documentation of the potentially harmful practice or defect; and 5) there is good reason to believe public disclosure will avoid the present or prevent similar future wrongdoing.

Sissela Bok: 1) The accusation must be directable to a person or groups of persons who are responsible for a threat to the public safety. 2) The danger must be a present or imminent threat. 3) The risk must be a concrete risk, a specifiable one. 4) It must arouse its audience. 5) It must not be done anonymously. 6) it must treat the accused fairly.

When can we not blow the whistle? We have to ask whether the personal consequences are too great. If they are, then the personal sacrifice may well outweigh the wrong.