examine the role that whistle-blowing can play for high-level management
I N V I T E D C O N T R I B U T I O N
The Responsibility to Lie and the Obligation to Report
Bonhoeffer’s ‘‘What Does It Mean to Tell the Truth?’’ And the Ethics of Whistleblowing
Scott R. Paeth
Published online: 23 January 2013
� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract This article is an examination of the moral
complexity of the act of whistleblowing in the context of
corporate corruption. Whistleblowing may be a morally
admirable act underataken by morally ambiguous agents,
but can only be fully understood in context. Using German
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay ‘‘What Does It
Mean to Tell the Truth?’’ This essay will examine how the
kind of deception sometimes necessary in whistleblowing
cases can be testimony to a larger and more profound truth.
Keywords Whistleblowing � Jeffrey Wigand � Mark Whitacre � Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Introduction
Whistleblowing is an ethically complex act that involves
several different overlapping understandings of obligation,
honesty, loyalty, and duty. 1
While whistleblowers are
often—with justification—portrayed as being heroic fig-
ures in the news media and popular culture, the decision to
engage in whistleblowing is not an act of pure unvarnished
moral righteousness. Rather, it involves the evaluation of
competing moral claims on one’s identity and action, and a
decision to act in ways that honor one set of moral obli-
gations at the expense of others. That this decision is often
justifiable on the basis of the larger question of the public
interest does not make it any less morally ambiguous from
the point of view of the person undertaking the act. 2
As
Lars Landblom (2007) argues:
The debate on morality whistleblowing centers on the
conflict between the duty of loyalty to the firm or
organization in which one works and the liberty to
speak out against wrongdoing. This is the moral
dilemma of whistleblowing. This dilemma comes
about because we tend to think, like Beauchamp and
Bowie, that ‘‘[e]mployees have both legal and moral
obligations to be loyal to their employers’’ (1988,
p. 262), and simultaneously hold that we should be
free to do our part in stopping immoral or dangerous
practices. (Landblom 2007, p. 415)
Yet, the conflict between loyalty and liberty represents only
one dimension of the larger set of moral conflicts inherent in
the decision to blow the whistle on corrupt corporate
practices. Participation in any organization is constituted by
a whole body of at least prima facie moral obligations,
which are called into question by the whistleblowing act.
Jensen (1987) breaks down the ethical tension points in
whistleblowing into two general categories: Procedural and
substantive (1987, p. 322). Procedural questions relate to
matters such as the seriousness of the potential offense and
the quality of the whistleblower’s information, as well as
such matters as the motives of the whistleblower and the
S. R. Paeth (&) DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA
e-mail: spaeth@depaul.edu
1 One challenge in any discussion of whistleblowing is defining the
term itself. While no definition is perfect, for the purposes of this
paper, I will assume the definition articulated by Jubb (1999):
‘‘Whistleblowing is a deliberate non-obligatory act of disclosure,
which gets onto public record and is made by a person who has or had
privileged access to data or information of an organization, about
non-trivial illegality or other wrongdoing whether actual, suspected or
anticipated which implicates and is under the control of that
organization, to an external entity having potential to rectify the
wrongdoing.’’ 2
For discussion of some of the ethical tensions inherent in the act of
whistleblowing, see Landblom (2007), Jensen (1987), Larmer (1992),
and Mesmer-Magnus and Viswesvaran (2005).
123
J Bus Ethics (2013) 112:559–566
DOI 10.1007/s10551-012-1557-2
timing of the act. Procedural questions may be thought of in
essentially prudential terms—they deal with judgments as
to the effectiveness of the whistleblowing act in a particular
time and place, in light of a particular set of circumstances.
Substantive questions, as Jensen notes, can be consid-
erably more ethically agonizing:
A nurse, for example, agonizes over whether to blow the
whistle on what she feels are seriously inadequate
practices in her health care unit of the hospital. She
realizes an obligation to the patients, to her peers, to her
supervisors, to the medical profession, to the hospital
administration, to her own self-worth, to the general
public, and to ‘‘the truth.’’ How can she balance all of
these loyalties and commitments when they begin to
conflict? Usually they exist together with no problem,
but conditions warranting whistleblowing usually mean
that some of these loyalties are now battling each other.
Which will take precedence in that particular situation?
Where in that mix of loyalties does one’s priority fall?
Which loyalties will have to be sacrificed, or at least set
aside temporarily? (Jensen 1987, p. 324)
Ethical analysis of moral conflicts is often resolved either
by consequentialist appeals to the greatest good, or by
attempts to rank moral obligations according to some
understanding of their relative weight on the moral scale.
As important as such attempts are, however, they tend to
obscure the tragic dimension of moral conflicts. In other
words, by attempting to treat the conflict as a problem
capable of a rationally consistent and universalizable
solution, they fail to give proper attention to what gives
rise to the conflict in the first place—the tension between
two deeply held and subjectively binding sets of obliga-
tions, neither of which can be let go by the agent without
some moral sacrifice. It is not that, in blowing the whistle,
one chooses between an ethical path and an unethical path,
but rather one chooses between two different ethical paths,
both of which one experiences as binding, and in choosing,
one must act unethically according to one of those paths.
In order to analyze the moral questions at stake in the act
of whistleblowing, I will examine two prominent examples
of corporate whistleblowing, with particular attention to the
motivations and decisions of the central actors in those
cases. I will then consider the position articulated by
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his essay fragment ‘‘What Does It
Mean to Tell the Truth?’’ in which he examines the con-
textual nature of truth telling and considers the possible
appropriateness of lying under certain circumstances. I will
then extend his argument to consider the question of con-
flicting loyalty in the context of corporate whistleblowing,
finally returning the central question of how it may be
possible to adjudicate between competing moral claims
in situations where corporate corruption and malfeasance
requires moral actions by employees that may violate their
group obligations to the company, and their sense of loy-
alty to their peers.
Whistleblowing: Two Case Studies
I begin with two case studies. These cases have been
widely examined and reported on, and both have been
made into big-budget Hollywood movies, with their pro-
tagonists portrayed by marquee actors. While substantially
different in their details, both cases reveal the moral
complexity involved in the whistleblowing decision.
The first case is that of Jeffrey Wigand, the former
Brown & Williamson tobacco researcher who in 1993 blew
the whistle on the cover-up by the tobacco industry of
research proving the harmfulness of tobacco smoke.
(Brenner 1996) Wigand was widely vilified by the tobacco
industry, and the initial report of his work by 60 Minutes
was quashed by threats of a lawsuit against CBS. 3
How-
ever, when the report was ultimately aired, it provided
devastating evidence that the tobacco industry had known
for decades that its products caused cancer and a raft of
other health effects in smokers. The documents demon-
strated that industry leaders had known this for years, and
yet testified repeatedly, often under oath, to the contrary. In
the wake of Wigand’s revelations, it became impossible for
tobacco companies to claim any longer that their products
were not harmful.
While Wigand’s actions were in many regards admira-
ble, and undertaken at great cost to himself, they were by
no means morally unambiguous, and Wigand himself is a
morally complex figure. As Marie Brenner notes, ‘‘the anti-
tobacco forces depict Jeffrey Wigand as a portrait of
courage, a Marlon Brando taking on the powers in On the
Waterfront. The pro-tobacco lobbies have been equally
vociferous in their campaign to turn Wigand into a demon,
a Mark Fuhrman who could cause potentially devastating
cases against the tobacco industry to dissolve over issues
that have little to do with the dangers of smoking.’’
(Brenner 1996, p. 5) Leaving aside the allegations made
against him by his former employers, who attempted to
paint him as feckless and profoundly dishonest, there are
other questions of group loyalty and obligation that need to
be considered when evaluating the moral implications of
his actions. 4
3 Among the tactics used against Wigand was the production of a 500
page dossier which purported to demonstrate that Wigand was an
unstable and unreliable witness. See Hwang and Geyelin (1996). 4
As regards the allegations made against him by his employers,
Brenner notes that the publicist responsible for the most damaging
allegations was investigated by the Department of Justice on charges
of witness intimidation (Brenner 1996, p. 5).
560 S. R. Paeth
123
Wigand was hired as Head of Research and Develop-
ment by Brown & Williamson Tobacco in 1989, ostensibly
to participate in the development of safer, low-tar ciga-
rettes to compete with other brands on the market. (Brenner
1996, pp. 8–9) He quickly came to realize that the job was
not what he expected. However, the $300,000 salary and
his belief that he was hired to pursue the development of
safer tobacco products kept him in the job for several years.
From the beginning, Wigand recognized that B&W did
not have the personnel or technology in his department to
do the kind of research necessary to produce safer prod-
ucts: ‘‘There was neither a toxicologist nor a physicist on
staff … How, he thought, could you be serious about studying the health aspects of tobacco or fire safety without
the proper experts?’’ (Brenner 1996, p. 9) He was also
being advised by legal experts to avoid, contrary to sci-
entific practice, keeping any notes or documentation that
could prove damaging to the company in litigation, while
lawyers ‘‘sometimes edited scientific information on addi-
tives.’’ (Brenner 1996, p. 9).
Wigand found himself increasingly in conflict with
B&W management over the company’s practices and
agenda. Information to which he should have had access as
head of R&D was withheld from him, including studies
demonstrating the adverse health effects of nicotine.
(Brenner 1996, p. 10) During this time, he began to keep an
extensive diary documenting much of what he had
uncovered about the company’s practices, though when he
was fired in 1993, his diary was never returned. (Brenner
1996, p. 10) As part of his severance package, Wigand
signed a life-long confidentiality agreement that required
him not to discuss Brown & Williamson in any way.
(Brenner 1996, p. 17) When he began to work as a con-
sultant for anti-tobacco groups and journalists attempting
to report on the story, he initially sought to operate within
the terms of the agreement, but eventually was persuaded
by 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman to go on record
about his experiences. 5
There are legitimate questions of whether or not Wigand
and other whistleblowers have any moral obligations to
hold in confidence things that they learn in the context of
corporate deliberations that are intended to be secret. In the
same vein, to what degree is it a violation of his obligation
to his employer to leak documents that are intended to be
understood as work product and thus the property of the
company that owns them? To what degree was Wigand
bound by contractual obligations to maintain confidential-
ity or honor non-disclosure agreements?
One strand of moral reflection on such questions would
answer that, to the extent that Wigand’s actions had the
consequence of exposing the deception of the cigarette
industry, and thus revealing the actual harm that they knew
cigarettes to cause, Wigand’s actions could be morally
justified as producing an overall greater good. 6
Another
strand of thinking would argue that we are not in fact bound
in any circumstances to honor promises that result in harm
to others, even if the act of promising itself is understood to
carry with it a strong conception of moral obligation. 7
The
content of the promise matters, and one cannot be morally
bound to honor a morally objectionable promise.
Then there is a strand of moral thinking that would
argue that Wigand was in fact unconditionally bound by his
promises, irrespective of their consequences. 8
Under this
interpretation, while Wigand may not have been obligated
to continue acting on behalf of Brown & Williamson once
he knew for a fact that they had been engaged in harmful
deception, he was bound by the promises and contracts that
he had undertaken to refuse to disclose that information
which he had promised to keep secret.
There are arguments to be made for each of these posi-
tions. They each take seriously one aspect or another of the
situation in which the whistleblower finds him or herself. A
consequentialist argument would recognize the obligation
that all moral agents have to maximize benefits or reduce
harms when it is within their power to do so. The failure to
take the harm done through our action or inaction into
account would render any moral theory dubious at a mini-
mum. On the other hand, if a consequentialist argument
requires us to disregard our promises, then the very act of
promising is potentially rendered meaningless, as any
promise can be broken at any time if the agents considers
5 Brenner (1996, p. 21) much of the subsequent drama surrounding
the story centered on the controversy within CBS about whether or
not to run the story, given the possibility of lawsuits as well as other
considerations. The details, while fascinating in their own right, are
peripheral to the basic moral question at stake, namely the conflict
between Wigand’s responsibilities as a former employee of B&W and
his obligations to the larger public as a whistleblower. It does bear
noting however that much of Brenner’s piece centers on the hardball
tactics used by Brown & Williamson to silence Wigand, and the role
that those tactics played in his ultimate decision. She summarizes the
perspective of one of her interviewees, Jack Palladino, as follows:
‘‘For Palladino, there is little about Wigand that reminds him of
Edmond Safra, the banker—and the client of Stanley Arkin—he
worked for who was also the victim of a smear. Safra was motivated
by a sense of moral outrage, Palladino tells me, whereas Wigand’s
level of tension is a sign of pure fear’’ (Brenner 1996, p. 31).
6 For a recent discussion of consequentialist moral theory, see
Mendola (2006). 7
For some recent discussions of the ethics of promising, see
Patterson (1992) and Conee (2000). 8
One could argue that promise-making is a foundational example of
an illocutionary act, a performative utterance the declaration of which
brings about a particular state of being. Thus, the act of pledging
loyalty to his employers brought about a set of obligations in Wigand
that would otherwise have not existed. But, existing, such a pledge is
by its nature binding. See Austin (1962).
The Responsibility to Lie and the Obligation to Report 561
123
the reasons sufficiently compelling. But if this is so, in what
sense are we reasonably engaged in the act of promising?
When we consider whistleblowing in the abstract, it is
relatively easy to view the actions of the whistleblower to
be unqualifiedly admirable, as exposing a secret which was
immoral to keep and revealing malfeasance the continuing
concealment of which could cause great harm. But looking
only at that dimension of the question obscures the cross-
hatching pattern of obligations and commitments in which
the whistleblower—as well as those who opt not to blow
the whistle on corporate corruption—are enmeshed.
A more problematic case of whistleblowing is that of
former Archer Daniels Midland executive Mark Whitacre.
While Jeffrey Wigand is a morally complex individual in
his own right, Whitacre raises a very different set of moral
questions. As a whistleblower, he engaged in some genu-
inely admirable actions, yet, in the process of doing so,
systematically lied, not only to his employer on behalf of
the FBI, but also to the FBI as he embezzled from ADM in
order to enrich himself. While he eventually confessed to
his crimes and served time in jail, his actions substantially
undermined the government’s case against ADM.
Between 1992 and 1995, Whitacre worked as a coop-
erating witness in an FBI investigation of ADM, recording
hundreds of hours of conversations between ADM execu-
tives and representatives of rival agricultural companies
from around the world. (Eichenwald 2000) These conver-
sations served as the foundational evidence in a price-fix-
ing case against ADM, revealing that the company had
‘‘organized a scheme to steal hundreds of millions of dol-
lars from its own customers.’’ (Eichenwald 2000, p. 7)
In order to help uncover ADM’s criminal activity, Whitacre
had to engage in a systematic campaign of deception and
subterfuge directed toward his employer and colleagues who
were in many cases also close friends. His cooperation with the
FBI required him to create a false presentation of himself to
those with whom he spent the bulk of most of his days. As
colleagues carried on what they assumed to be private con-
versations, Whitacre was recording it all, even as he partici-
pated, laughed, joked, and told ribald tales along with them. His
entire professional self-display was in this sense a lie. While
pretending to be a colleague and co-conspirator, he was in fact
a double agent, a spy.
There was a sense in which Whitacre seemed to relish the
experience. He frequently volunteered information that the
FBI was not specifically seeking, and took risks beyond
those required of him by the investigation, often to the
immense frustration of his FBI handlers. At the same time,
the enormous stress of the experience took a great toll on
him. His enthusiasm for helping the FBI was counterbal-
anced by moments of panic, while his demeanor at home
became more withdrawn and eccentric. As Kurt Eichenwald
writes:
It wasn’t just his frequent absences anymore, or his
repeated failure to attend family events or just come
home for dinner. Those aspects of his behavior had
almost become accepted in the household as a given.
But now, even when he was home, he wasn’t com-
pletely there. Mark seemed to be drifting through his
family, with the detachment of a commuter waiting
for a train to take him away.
But there was more. Ginger didn’t understand it, but
Mark had just become weird. Over the summer, they
had built horse stables across the street, and Ginger
loved to relax with an occasional ride. But Mark
would disappear to the stables for hours, often not
returning until 2:00 in the morning. Usually he would
come home saying that he had been brushing the
horses. Brushing the horses for three or four hours?
Then, a few hours later, he would head for work. It
just wasn’t normal. He seemed to be getting almost
no sleep. (Eichenwald 2000, p. 254)
Then there was the issue of the embezzling. On August 7,
1995, ADM fired Whitacre, accusing him of having
embezzled more than $2.5 million from the company.
(Henkoff 1995) Whitacre claimed that this money was
compensation that ADM had agreed to pay him. But his
ever-changing story and repeated inconsistencies were
extremely damaging to the government’s case against
ADM. In the end, the company was able to argue
persuasively that Whitacre’s actions amounted to embez-
zlement and money laundering. He eventually pled guilty
to ‘‘charges of wire fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to
defraud the IRS, filing false income tax return, and
interstate transportation of stolen property’’. (U. S. Depart-
ment of Justice 1997) In his plea deal, he admitted to
embezzling as much as $9 million from Archer Daniels
Midland. As Whitacre later explained to Kurt Eichenwald:
Shortly after arriving at the company … he had heard rumors that some executives had engaged in corpo-
rate frauds – yet no one seemed to care. And indeed,
just two years after Whitacre’s arrival at ADM, the
corporate treasurer left the company amidst allega-
tions of financial wrongdoing, yet no criminal action
was ever taken.
Stealing seemed to pose little risk of punishment.
And so, Whitacre stole. ‘‘They’re criminals,’’ he said.
‘‘What are they going to do if they catch me? How
could they risk having a criminal case?’’ … The later multimillion-dollar thefts, he said, only
came about when he believed the investigation was
coming to a close. He feared that the case put his
finances at risk and decided to steal more to protect
himself. (Eichenwald 2000, p. 561)
562 S. R. Paeth
123
This confession sums up much of the paradox of Mark
Whitacre: it is both self-serving and morally self-aware; he
recognizes on the one hand that what he was doing was
illegal, but argues that he was justified because he was
surrounded by a culture of corruption; and he finally
attempts to exculpate himself on the grounds that the
investigation launched as a result of his own revelations to
the FBI so endangered his personal finances that he felt
compelled to go for the big score while he still could. In all
of this, however, it never seems to fully dawn on him how
damaging his actions were to they very moral stand that he
had so courageously taken in the first place—to become a
whistleblower in order to expose a deep morass of
corporate corruption. In the end, knowing where the lies
end and the truth begins is the central challenge in
understanding Mark Whitacre and his motivations.
Whitacre is a fascinating character on several levels. On
the one hand, he approached the FBI voluntarily to inform
them about ADM’s corrupt practices (though only after
having cajoled to do so by his wife), and then assisted the
FBI in gathering information by wearing a wire to a series
of meetings in which their price-fixing scheme was dis-
cussed. Over a period of 3 years he provided the FBI with
hundreds of hours of tape validating the violation of U.S.
law, not only by ADM executives but also by executives of
several other firms. ‘‘With little obvious incentive, Mark
Whitacre secretly recorded colleagues and competitors as
they illegally divided the world markets among themselves,
setting far higher prices for their products than free com-
petition would allow.’’ (Eichenwald 2000, p. 7)
At the same time, he had embezzled more than nine
million dollars himself from ADM, lied extensively to the
FBI in the aftermath of his discovery, engaged in bizarre
behavior, and even went so far as to accuse the FBI of
forcing him to destroy evidence. As a result, Whitacre
wound up being the only subject of the investigation to
spend any actual time in jail.
Whitacre’s case brings up many of the same problems as
the Wigand case, but adds the additional element of
Whitacre’s self-conscious deception of both his employers
and the FBI. Yet, like Wigand and other whistleblowers, he
did expose a significant case of corporate corruption and
criminal activity. To some degree, his more obviously
blame-worthy actions may be mitigated morally by mental
illness and the pressure of working undercover for the FBI,
but it is also possible to morally evaluate and distinguish
between his deception of ADM on the one hand, and his
deception of the FBI on the other, in order to gain a clearer
understanding of what the morally problematic nature of
the latter deception was. In order to aid in this, I will turn
now to the work of the German theologian Dietrich
Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer on Responsibility, Truth Telling, and Lying
In Bonhoeffer’s fragmentary essay ‘‘What Does It Mean to
Tell the Truth?’’ he offers a telling illustration of the nature
of truth telling and deception. Imagine he says, a circum-
stance in which a child is called out by his teacher in front
of his class and asked if his father often comes home drunk
(Bonhoeffer 2006, pp. 601ff.) The child, Bonhoeffer
argues, would lie in order to protect his father, but in doing
so, would actually be telling a larger and more significant
truth, namely that the teacher has exceeded his authority in
asking the question, and violated the sovereign moral
sphere of the family. It is not for the teacher to ask such
questions in such circumstances, and by saying no, the
child affirms, in an inchoate way, the more basic and
fundamental truth of his situation. As Bonhoeffer puts the
matter:
Lies on the part of children and inexperienced per-
sons in general can frequently be traced back to their
being placed in situations that they cannot fully
fathom. For this reason it is questionable whether it
makes sense to generalize and extend the concept of
lying (which is and ought to be understood as
something downright reprehensible) in such a way
that it coincides with the concept of a formally untrue
statement. Indeed, all of this demonstrates how dif-
ficult it is to say what lying really is. (Bonhoeffer
2006, p. 606)
