Of the whistleblowing cases that we’ve looked at, not much good has come out of whistleblowing. Generally, when a whistleblowing incident occurs, the whistleblower gets punished, and the public perceives a bad image of the organization whose secret has been exposed. Despite the negative consequences, some people may still believe it is justified to whistleblow if an organization tries to cover up engineering disasters. In our journey of innovation, we are bound to run into failures when we explore something new; there is always risk involved in engineering. We can try to rush to build something new but risk of running into disaster. On the other hand, if we spend too much effort into testing, we will never make much progress. There is no perfect algorithm that computes the optimal amount of risk acceptance, but we can always learn from our mistakes. In the Therac-25 and the Challenger Space Shuttle cases, these incidents occurred because people pushed the bounds of risk too far, but we can take these mistakes and adjust our risk acceptance accordingly to avoid running into these types of engineering disasters again. In terms of whether engineers are obligated to speak the truth, I think it really depends on the situation. If we consider the Manning case, whistleblowing had unfavorable consequences. Leaking the footage of innocent civilians being killed not only caused Manning to be punished and sentenced to jail but also hurt the image of the government. With the evidence from the footage, it is indisputable that the military did commit an immoral act, but it is just a single instance that shouldn’t reflect the image of the entire organization. As a whole, the government is just doing its best for the people of America, and it is unfair to let a single fault to tarnish the image entire organization and lose the trust of its people over an operation in which only a few people of the government and military were involved. In general, I think it is best for engineers to not immediately speak out the truth, unless it is justified. Although Manning’s case was not truly justified for whistleblowing, there are some cases in which whistleblowing is considered necessary. For example, if an organization was secretly condoning unethical practices, contrary to the image that the public sees it by, then the person who discovers this information should be responsible for reporting it by following the correct whistleblowing procedures. Even though the whistleblower would most likely lose his or her job in the process, it would be a worthy sacrifice for saving the people who were impacted by the organization’s unethical practices. Ultimately, the difference between this scenario and the Manning case, for instance, is based on the behavior of the organization. If the organization is inherently bad and the public did not know about it, then whistleblowing would be absolutely justified, maybe even an obligation. If, however, an organization were involved in an unethical operation that was not approved by higher-ups, whistleblowing should be ignored for the sake of upholding the image of the organization. Therefore, whistleblowing is good only when the exposure of the organization’s secrets outweighs the damage inflicted on the organization.
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