The Studies Of Whistle-blowing In Engineering

The issue of whistle-blowing is one of important topics in engineering ethics, which involves a series of complicated ethical issues. In this paper, we will focus our attention on whistle-blowing and loyalty of the engineers. There are some disputes about this topic at all times. Some people believe that whistle-blowing undermines the loyalty to the employer which engineer should have and makes organization suffer from serious losses. Therefore, they strongly advocate avoiding whistle-blowing. However, some other people insist that whistle-blowing is necessary and defensible. Facing to the two conflictive ideas, our opinion? In our opinion, when we try to answer the question, we should make clear that what whistle-blowing is and why it happen first.From the word' derivation, we know that whistle-blowing occurs when an employee conveys information about a significant moral problem to someone in a position to take action on the problem, and does so outside approved organizational channels (or against strong pressure). So, why does whistle-blowing happen? In our opinion, it is related to the three missions that the engineers shoulder.We know that the engineer plays the two different roles in engineering practice: as an employee and as a professional. As an employee, the engineer must be loyal to the employer, because the engineer is salaried from the employer. But as a professional, firstly the engineer should be loyal to the profession, because the profession is the way of earning a living. Except that, the engineer also should be loyal to the public, because he knows that the public has the need. But the engineer often finds that there is a conflict between each other, yet whistle-blowing is the result of the confliction.In the modern society, most of the engineers are employed by the corporation or the enterprise. As an economic body, the first objective of the corporation is to earn profits. Driven by profits, the employer can do anything by any kind of means. Sometimes, in order to gain profits, they even do something at the cost of the public interests. In this situation, to protect the public interests, some engineers who have the sense of social responsibilities choose to blow the whistle. When whistle-blowing happens, different individuals have different opinions. Employer, manager and whistleblower's coworker believe that whistle-blowing is unethical, because it disobey the loyalty to employer. But the public and whistleblowers consider it as a heroic behavior. Then, should we identify the two conflictive ideas?In our opinion, whistle-blowing doesn't violate the loyalty to employer; furthermore, it presents the consolidation of the engineer's loyalty to the employer, the public and the profession. Because we will clarify that whistle-blowing is the only choice; whistle-blowing serves for the organization in the long term; whistle-blowing is the whole loyalty, it represents the engineers' responsibilities to the public. At last, we also discuss how to protect whistleblowers.