Whistleblower Ethical Dilemmas

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Introduction According to Alford (2007), a whistleblower is one who speaks out against illegal or unethical practices in school or in the organization where he or she works. Whistle-blowing, is an essential factor for pin-pointing and eradicating unethical activities in most organization set ups (Brown, 2008). According to Sawyer, Johnson and Holub (2010), most individuals disregard the idea of whistle-blowing because they fear that they will be avoided and could end up losing their job careers and also their good names. When an individual is torn between two or more deeds and have virtuous reasons for choosing each action, this is regarded to as an ethical dilemma. There is an ethical debate on whistle blowing which mainly is concerned with …show more content…

There was a study that was conducted to gauge the ethical views of male and female final year Accounting students in South Africa and was used as a comparison to results of similar studies performed in Australia and Ireland (Sadler, 2005). The most prevailing factor that proved to be a moral dilemma for these students is the issue of cheating in the examination rooms. Those students who saw other students cheating in the Accounting exams faced the moral dilemma of whether to report their fellow classmates or maintain their friendships that they had already become accustomed …show more content…

A student could observe another student being given special treatment by a lecturer like for example being exempted from doing main examinations but at the end of the semester the student immerges the to be the top of the class. The student who observes this special treatment could face a moral dilemma between reporting the lecturer to the dean of the that course but could also be uncertain that if and when he or she reports this said incident if his or her semester grades for that course could be in affected in a negative way for example by getting a lower grade than