{"id":23736,"date":"2024-06-20T09:35:31","date_gmt":"2024-06-20T07:35:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/?p=23736"},"modified":"2024-07-02T15:32:50","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T13:32:50","slug":"why-do-people-become-whistleblowers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2024\/06\/why-do-people-become-whistleblowers\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do people become whistleblowers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The former BMJ editor Richard Smith<\/a> is writing about a new book by Carl Elliott “The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No<\/a>” that is on backorder now. Most interesting\u00a0 for me is not his book review but his own insights.<\/p>\n

Over the years I\u2019ve been rung by potential whistleblowers, and I say to them two uncomfortable things: you have a duty to act but you are likely to be badly damaged as a result… What I haven\u2019t said to them but will now after reading Elliott\u2019s book is that the damage you experience is likely to affect your whole life. It\u2019s a matter of power: \u201cdoctors have it and their subjects don\u2019t.\u201d Elliott quotes John Pesando, a whistleblower in the Cincinnati case, who says \u201cEvery whistleblower is an amateur playing against professionals.\u201d […]
\nMost of us don\u2019t blow the whistle because we recognise where the power lies. The state, the university, our employer, or the professor will crush us. But some people do blow the whistle. What drives them? Elliott concludes that there is no whistleblower \u201ctype\u201d but that they usually act for deeply held moral reasons. He invokes the somewhat old fashioned idea of \u201chonour\u201d as the best way to explain why they act. […]
\nAn alternative explanation offered by political scientist Fred Alford is \u201cnarcissism moralised.\u201d Perhaps that\u2019s close to honour. When I think of whistleblowers I know I think of people with a much greater sense of right and wrong than most of us have. I could use words like \u201cexaggerated\u201d or even \u201cpathological,\u201d but I like the concept of honour. I certainly admire whistleblowers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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