Why all these whistleblowers recently?

Whistleblowing, this obscure practice discussed in most business ethics textbooks (we do so in Chapter 7), has become a big topic of discussion these days. The latest incident is Edward Snowdon and his revelation about the ongoing surveillance of phone and internet usage of American citizens by the US government. But he is not alone: currently on trial is Bradley Manning, who provided Wikileaks with the material for exposing the diplomatic correspondence of the US government.

The general contention with whistleblowing is becoming clear in both cases: are these individual traitors who defaulted on their duties by breaching the rules and codes they had agreed to abide by when entering their job? Or are they ‘heroes’ whose behavior is governed by higher, more general, and persistent ethical standards than their day-to-day job environment would allow them to follow?

It is useful to look at some historic cases of whistleblowing – and indeed cases, where certainly by hindsight the general agreement seems to be that the whistleblowers are in the second category of ‘ethical hero’. Think of Jeffrey Wigand, the executive of tobacco company Brown&Williamson who exposed the practice of enhancing the addictive potential of cigarettes of his employer (famously turned into the movie The Insider). Or think of Sherron Watkins, who initially blew the whistle on the practices at ENRON and contributed to the uncovering of the scandal in 2001. Turning to the political sphere, currently many references are made to Daniel Ellsberg who in 1971 leaked the ‘Pentagon Papers’ disclosing that the US government for years had systematically mislead the public about the impact, casualties and costs of the Vietnam war.

Whistleblowing commonly seems to occur in a situation where the moral status of organizational practice – be it a private company or a public institution such as the NSA or the Pentagon – deviate from the wider moral values which society deems appropriate. And crucially, it has to be added, these actions also deviate from the professed moral standards of the organization against which those individuals blow the whistle.

This is rather evident in the case of Ellsberg: by the early 1970s, the public in the US all long thought that the war in Vietnam had lost its moral cause; his revelations proved that the US government, too, was all along aware that what it did in Vietnam no longer could live up to the public mission and norms according to which the American government professed to act. Similar are the cases of Wigand and Watkins: in the same way the Tobacco industry outwardly professed that they were not aware of the addictive impact of cigarettes, ENRON had always claimed to be an ethical company. The same applies to the current Manning and Snowdon cases: Obama ran on the promise to stop the abuses by the previous Bush administration and to restore basic civil liberties – and is now found out to do the same or worse.

The dilemma of whistleblowers all points to the fundamental differentiation established by Max Weber a century ago: Members of a social group (incl. an organization) can act according to an ethics of responsibility or according to an ethics of conviction. The first looks at the consequences of an action and basically suggests that a virtuous individual is one that lives up to the expectations of all who are affected directly by the consequences of an action. In practice, this boils down to abiding by the rules and procedures of the organization. The main arguments against whistleblowing then all come in the shape of what the effects of the revelations are on other people (that was the big argument against Wikileaks) or how it affects the general functioning of a secret service where everybody potentially can leak anything (the current debate on Snowdon).

What justifies whistleblowing then is Weber’s ethics of conviction according to which an individual makes an ethical choice based on personal moral convictions. The act is based on principles, rather than anticipated consequences. In most cases whistleblowers refer to general principles of either good business practice regarding customers (the tobacco case) or shareholders (ENRON) or good government based on some basic democratic principles (such as the Ellsberg, Manning or Snowdon case).

Historically, such reasoning based on an ethics of conviction always becomes more relevant at a time when fundamental values of society are in question and challenged. The Vietnam war raised basic questions about the moral limits of the cold war; the tobacco scandals exposed the lack of basic moral rules of consumer protection; ENRON initiated the ongoing moral scrutiny of a shareholder value dominated form of capitalism; the Manning and Snowdon cases now raise fundamental moral questions about civic liberties, civic rights to privacy and protection of personal data and the appropriate powers of the state in protecting these liberties.

It is somewhat tragic – as probably the cases of Ellsberg and Wigand best illustrate – that whistleblowers are mostly recognized as moral, conviction-driven human beings quite some time after the events. At the time of the whistleblowing defenders of the status quo always wield two crucial tools: they can either invoke arguments following an ethics of responsibility and point to the potential harm and the anarchic nature of the act; Bradley Manning’s trial can be followed as a textbook example of this reasoning.

Or, they can try to discredit the ‘convictions’ of the whistleblower. Since these often reflect a wider moral consensus in society it is hard to attack those principles or norms directly. More effective seems to be an approach that discredits the whistleblower on a personal level. In Ellsberg’s case the CIA broke into his psychiatrist’s office to obtain information on his mental health and love life; in Wigand’s case a similar smear campaign was initiated. Currently with regard to Edward Snowdon, it is conspicuous how the entire political spectrum in the US is more or less embarking on this trajectory. From Bill Maher’s jokes last Friday night on Real Time to David Brook’s notorious profile in the New York Times - most seem eager to present him as some sort of self-aggrandizing nerd.

Whistleblowers turn up at a time when societies or organizations are deviating from commonly accepted and widely shared moral values. Whatever our concrete judgment about individuals and their motives - the fact that whistleblowing occurs at this point in history clearly points to a wider epiphany. Ironically, Snowdon relocated to the very country which for so long has been accused by the West of not respecting the human rights of their citizens in exactly this issue arena – much to the distress of Google, Yahoo or other companies. It looks like Obama currently has a bit of a hard time to explain to China, Russia or even his European allies, how his approach to privacy and data protection still reflects basic values of liberal democracies.

Picture by DonkeyHotey, reproduced under the Creative Commons License.

Mitt is on the money

It is final now: Mitt Romney is the official presidential candidate of the Republican Party for 2012.  This is in itself a little miracle. To begin with, given the strength of Christian fundamentalists in the GOP – from Evangelicals to Catholics – it is still remarkable that a Mormon has finally made it to the top of the ticket. Given the history of Mormonism in the US and its longstanding antagonism from ‘mainstream’ Christian groups this is probably the clearest indicator of the magnitude of resentment towards Obama. To Tea Party fundamentalists, even an apostate is more acceptable than – I guess – a black person in the White House. Those two delegates who threw nuts at a black CNN camerawoman with the comment "this is how we feed the animals" are probably – despite the political correctness of the official reaction - just an indicator of the Republican Zeitgeist.

There is though another reason why this is even more interesting. After all, this is the first election where private corporations (or rich business owners through their companies) are able to basically fund the campaigns of their preferred candidates without any limits. We saw this clearly in the primaries, where candidates such as Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum were all able to stay in the race far beyond what their paltry successes in the primaries would traditionally suggest. It was ironic, that the Citizens United ruling by a Republican-leaning Supreme Court in 2010 reared its predictably ugly head first to the detriment of the Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney himself. Newt Gingrich was probably the best example: not only did his philandering past made him unpalatable for even the most ideological GOP supporters at the base, but also his success in the primaries was dismal –he could not even win his home state Georgia. He stayed in the race though because his ‘sugardaddy’ Sheldon Adelson poured limitless amounts of cash into his campaign. Adelson, the owner of a global Casino empire, is currently investigated for breach of the Foreign- and Corrupt Practices Act by the US Justice Authorities and has good reasons to make sure whoever ends up in the White House has some loyalties to him.

The Republican primaries have shown that rich individuals, after the Citizens United ruling, basically can buy elections. It will be exciting to watch how this will now impact the presidential campaigns in the fall in the US. Mind you, four years ago it was Obama who had the biggest coffers. And still today, if one just analyzes the funds of the actual campaigns of Obama and Romney, where donations are capped at $5,000, Obama is still leading Romney (according to a recent report in The New Yorker). However, what the Citizen United ruling has allowed is the creation of so called ‘Super PACs’ (as in political action committee), which can advertise on behalf and in the interest of a candidate and can accept unlimited amounts of donations.

The effect is fairly impressive. Already now, if we look at the Super PACs around both candidates, Romney with $120m in donations leads Obama by factor four. Adelson alone has pledged $100m to get rid of Obama and other rich republican donors such as the Koch brothers are willing to donate whatever it takes. Estimates suggest that Romney (and his entourage) by November may have been able to spent some mindboggling $1.2bn dollars!

The interesting thing here then is that for some reasons, the Obama campaign is not playing the same game. This not so much due to a lack of potential donors (according to the cited article); there are enough rich business people who are leaning towards the Democrats. It appears that Obama himself is not too keen on becoming too close and dependant from wealthy individuals and interests. Another factor appears also to be that some of the individuals who potentially could play the game of the Koch’s and Adelsons’ on the other side feel that this trend in politics is not desirable: “I don’t want to see democracy go in that direction”, Warren Buffett (a longstanding Obama supporter) is quoted in The New Yorker.

There are many people among the Democrats who are worried about this. After all, come fall it may well be possible that most advertising time on TV and radio has already been bought by Republican Super-PACs. And indeed, as we have frequently discussed here on this blog, the current situation in the US lifts the entire debate of corporate influence on the political process to a truly new level. There is now only a little and mostly cosmetic difference between how ‘third world’ dictators can buy elections and the way the sheer financial backing of a candidate and his capacity to spend on his campaign will decide the US Presidential election.

The Republican primaries though have left us with a glimmer of hope – albeit in a somewhat twisted way. After all, despite the corporate backers of several candidates, in the end the Republican base by persistently not voting, for instance for Gingrich, finally got to speak the last word. The assumption that money can buy an election then rests on a simple assumption: that the majority of the electorate, in fact: the few millions of swing voters in some ten states of the US who effectively have decided elections in the last decades are stupid enough to fall for a bombardment of advertising (for which most of the funds are used these days) and just succumb to these formidable means of manipulation. Or is it still also true, as the Republican base has shown, that voters still have some minimal set of convictions and the ability to see through all the veneer of a political campaign – and decide for themselves. One way or the other, these specific circumstances have added an ingredient to this presidential campaign which might actually make it a slightly more interesting spectacle to watch.

Artwork from DonkeyHotey, reproduced under the Creative Commons License.