Can Whistleblowing Be FULLY Legitimated?

Whistleblowing as a phenomenon seems puzzling. The whistleblower presumably acts to bring a wrongful practice to public attention so that those with power are enabled to correct the situation. Bok observes, Given the indispensable services performed by so many whistleblowers, strong public support is often merited.1 Yet Myron and Penina Glazerw report that in over two thirds of the sixty-four cases they documented whistleblowers suffered severe negative consequences.3 When a social practice issues in consequences which marginalize or endanger the agent, when the agent may become a pariah for the it is impossible to claim that practice is regarded as fully legitimate. I am interested in exploring the paradox. Why, in the case of whistleblowing, does committing truth result in punitive sanctions? How might we, as a society, increase the probability that this virtue is rewarded rather than punished? Why have we been so slow to do just that? To answer these questions, I consider all four topics Duska4 considers central to a theoretical discussion of whistleblowing, (1) definition;5 (2) whether and when whistleblowing is permissible; or (3) obligatory; and (4) appropriate mechanisms for institutionalizing whistleblowing. In Section I, I discuss two important recent defini tions of whistleblowing, concluding that whistleblowing is a specific type of action: going public with privileged information about a legitimate organization in order to prevent non-trivial public harm. In Section 2, I explore the moral ambiguity inherent in whistleblowing and the complications this affords to Goldberg's persuasive case for seeing a case of potential whistleblowing as either inappropriate or obligatory 6