Hear that whistle blow
I was very intrigued by
wychwood's long and chewy post about Paul du Gay's In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organisation, Ethics but but my mind has been snagging on the following all day and I am trying to get the thoughts out of my head and into semi-coherent (still jetlagged) words.
wychwood summarises part of the argument thus: According to the book, Weber argued that people lived their lives in entirely separate spheres - the work self and the family self and the self out shopping have no overlap or contact between them, they are independent.... [W]hen du Gay looks at it in more detail later on, it seems like some of the argument is actually about ideals - people should be different at work, or, rather, bureaucrats shouldn't allow their personal opinions and ideas to affect the way they discharge their duties. Weber says you can protest policies to your superiors; you can push for change and disagree with how things are. But once your bosses confirm that the rules are the rules, it's your job to enforce them as though you believed in them implicitly. I'm not sure where that leaves whistleblowers - they're going against that ethos, but I think they're often right to do so. On the other hand, I find it hard to generate a rational morality which allows for whistleblowers without also allowing the kind of intrusion of personal morality that I do disagree with, such as pharmacists who refuse to dispense contraception or KKK members in the police force pushing a racist agenda.
It seemed to me that there is a moral distinction between whistleblowers and people who use their position within a system to pursue an agenda conformable with their own interests which is not just about the intrusion of purely private morality.
For me, there is a huge chasm here between openness and hypocrisy. The whistleblower may already have raised concerns with their line management and got an unsatisfactory response (and in cases of whistleblowing, what is going on may not merely be ethically dubious but actually illegal). The person who is supposed to be acting in a neutral and evenhanded manner but is inflicting their own agenda is probably not taking up their objections to the higher levels in the organisation and may, in fact, be doing this entirely covertly or in collusion with a group of like-minded individuals within the institution.
This recalled to me that somewhere in one of volumes of Doris Lessing's Children of Violence sequence, she contrasts two women active in the affairs of the capital of 'Zambesia', the fictional counterpart of Rhodesia: Mrs van der Meerwe, the progressive activist, and Mrs Maynard, married to one of the most influential men in the local establishment. Lessing points out that the dangerous subversive perceived as aiming at the destruction of all the white colonial settlers hold dear operates transparently and in the open; she makes no secret of what she is up to. Mrs Maynard, however, operates by gossip and backstairs influence and indirect moves.
The whistleblower is making a public statement and potentially facing adverse consequences. The other side of the equation is being sneaky and underhanded. If you see public morality as being about society, the whistleblower is accepting a responsibility to the wider public sphere beyond their institution.
There are also ways of balancing private and public morality: I think of Gerald Gardiner (who became Lord Chancellor under the Wilson government) who refused elevation to the bench until after the abolition of the death penalty, as he had strong views against this. (I concede that this is not the sort of option open to everybody.)
As an archivist, I am obliged (within the limits of e.g. the law on data protection) to make the archives in my care available to all researchers; I cannot refuse access on the grounds that a particular researcher is a frothing sensationalist conspiracy theorist.
However, what I can do when the frothing conspiracy theorist publishes their sensationalist theory is point out their tearing of material from its context and embedding it in a morass of unexamined assumptions (the dangerous procession from 'could have' via 'would have' 'must have' to 'did'). This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2155715.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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