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Ethical egoism and whistleblowing

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I need your help with these 2 questions. I posted the Lecture (See Attachment).

1. If you always act to promote your own happiness, what ethical worth is added by the utilitarian who states that you should? (I urge you to read the lecture this week before answering the question--creating the "greatest good for the greatest number of people" does not enter into the answer.) :)

2. What ethical value system would you say that the whistleblower uses? Couch your response in deontological and teleological terms.
(The true whistleblower for our discussion purposes is one who is exposing to the public something of magnitude in his or her own company. That is one of the origins of the term, if you think about it, and what makes it such a hard choice for the whistleblower in most cases.

A referee spots a foul on the court or field and blows his whistle. Doing so causes a couple of things to happen: it stops play, and usually a penalty is awarded one of the teams. In the business setting, the whistleblower is, in effect, blowing the whistle on his or her own team. He or she is stopping play and looking for a penalty to be awarded, but the act is one of disloyalty to the company at the expense of loyalty to some other ethical principle or principles.

The point is that we aren't talking here about some disgruntled employee trying to cause trouble for management or a fellow worker. We've all seen those kind of cases, but they are not of the nature of the true whistleblower cases. Nor are we talking about someone who follows the company management chain or reporting procedures to have the issue resolved internally.

In whistleblower cases, individuals have usually tried to resolve the issue within the company and have had their pleas fall on deaf ears. In any event, the whistleblowers for the purposes of this discussion go public with their charges.)

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Solution Summary

This post looks at ethical egoism, utilitarianism, happiness and whistleblowing. Are moral acts always done for selfish interests? What is the relationship between being happy and being good? What is the value of whistleblowing? These are some of the questions examined in this post. You will also find some interesting examples here.

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1. According to utilitarians, people always act for their own interest. From this they formulated their ethics by affirming that people should always act in their own interest. If we understand ethics as being not just descriptive but rather prescriptive, then when we act according to our own selfish interest, we are acting ethically. In other words, the utilitarians through the description of how people act, arrived at how they should act.

One could argue that when people are happy, they are always good or act in a good way. But being good does not make people happy. So it is better to act in a good way than striving to be good. And the only way to act in a good way, or to ...

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