Whistleblowing: what if your CEO is a Caesar?

What are the boundaries of legitimate protest?

Charles Foster

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

On a conference stage, a seated speaker leans back and opines

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons .

If you discovered that the company you worked for was doing work that posed an existential risk to humanity, would you consider yourself entitled – or perhaps morally obliged – to blow the whistle?

This issue provoked a recent open letter from current and former employees at AI companies including Sam Altman’s OpenAI, asserting that the laws protecting whistleblowers are inadequate because they typically focus on illegal activity – and the AI companies concerned are doing nothing which is (yet) illegal. It called for companies to take a number of steps (including not entering into or enforcing agreements prohibiting the raising of risk-related concerns).

Some might say that if an employee takes the company’s money, that money should buy loyal silence, and that if the public interest demands a different approach, the remedy is the extension to risk-related concerns of existing whistleblower legislation. But unless and until that legislation is extended, should we applaud conscience-driven breaches of contract?

What about breaches of the criminal law for morally justifiable reasons – for instance to draw attention to the risks that the protestors say are associated with climate change?

The reality of modern corporate governance means that the CEO may be more practically Caesarean than a country’s government.

Christian debate about these issues has traditionally turned on two Bible texts. Paul, in writing to those in a Roman church, declares: ‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed….the authority… is the agent of God.’ And Jesus, in Matthew's gospel, advises us to ‘render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God that which is God’s.’

Who are the ‘authorities’ spoken of by Paul? Who is the modern Caesar spoken of by Jesus? Presumably in each case – in a parliamentary democracy – it is the combined legislature and executive of the day. Perhaps, these days, we should translate ‘Caesar’ as ‘the social contract’. But does this mean that (if we take these injunctions seriously) we should regard ourselves as bound not to commit criminal offences (which are offences against the state), but should feel no corresponding inhibition about breaching private law obligations, such as those owed under contracts of employment? My instinct is to say that this is indeed what it means, but that is not self-evident. After all, much employment law is statutory – an emanation of Parliament, and the reality of modern corporate governance means that the CEO may be more practically Caesarean than a country’s government.

Rendering the right thing to Caesar in a theocracy such as Byzantium might mean something very different in a modern tyranny or a democracy.

Should Christians, though, feel constrained by these scriptural passages? Both Paul and Jesus seemed to think that there was little point in establishing lasting social, legal or governmental structures because the end times were just around the corner. Jesus thought that some of his audience would still be alive when the Son of Man returned to complete the messianic project without any help from any secular governor. Paul’s belief that the Second Coming of Christ was at hand was behind his advice that the unmarried (unless they really couldn’t stay celibate) should remain unmarried and get on with the urgent business of preparing for the imminent in-rush of the true Kingdom. Both Jesus and Paul were dramatically wrong about the chronology. Why, then, should we take seriously advice about the regulation of society that was based on their mistake? Should Paul’s advice to those Romans be read as pragmatism – intended by him to convince rulers that Christians wouldn’t make trouble, and that therefore the Christians should be left alone? He may have thought that a shabby compromise with secular powers didn’t matter much because it wouldn’t last long.

Even if these texts are in some meaningful sense authoritative, what do they mean for modern life? As ever, the devil (and potentially the angel) is in the detail, and Paul and Jesus left the church to work out the relevant details. There is no consensus. Rendering the right thing to Caesar in a theocracy such as Byzantium might mean something very different in a modern tyranny or a democracy. Only in a few situations is the correct answer obvious: no one would doubt that those martyred for refusing to worship the Caesar of the day had made the (or at least a) right choice. But as soon as we move away from such cases the waters get muddy. Would Paul have denounced Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the plot to kill Hitler? If so, would he have been right? It cannot be seriously argued that it is illegitimate to protest against the policies of the day, any more than it could be suggested that Paul requires us to cast our vote in favour of the currently ruling party.

What, then, are the boundaries of legitimate protest?

Suppose that AI really does pose a threat to the whole of humanity. Does ‘rendering to God’ not then demand, in a private law context, that the whistle be blown, even if it involves a breach of a contractual obligation? It seems at least arguable.

Is a breach of the criminal law – for instance in the case of climate change protestors – different? It may well be.

In England the law has evolved a nuanced approach to ethically motivated criminality. That approach was recently displayed in the sentencing of five Extinction Rebellion activists for criminal damage to the premises of a bank. The judge accepted that each defendant believed that the bank was culpably involved in funding fossil fuel extraction projects, and that such projects endangered the planet. He noted that Lord Hoffman had said: ‘People who break the law to affirm their belief in the injustice of a law or government action are sometimes vindicated by history [for instance the suffragettes]. It is the mark of a civilized community that it can accommodate protests and demonstrations of this kind. But there are conventions which are generally accepted by the law-breakers on one side and the law-enforcers on the other. The protestors behave with a sense of proportion and do not cause excessive damage or inconvenience. And they vouch the sincerity of their beliefs by accepting the penalties imposed by the law.’ In return, he went on, the state behaves with restraint, and the judiciary imposes sentences which take the conscientious motives into account.

This approach, said the sentencing judge, amounts to a ‘social compact between the courts and protestors.’

Perhaps, in the realm of the criminal law, that sort of social compact encodes the relevant moral and theological principles as well as anything can.

Explainer

Creed

Virtues

15 March 2024

6 min read

Temperance: neurotic vice or self-control for future benefit?

We’re better at bravery than temperance, just when we need that self-control more than ever.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A casually dressed man perches on railing balancing, clasping his hands and looking around.

Jed Villejo on Unsplash.

The 21st century is witnessing a crisis of temperance, self-discipline, and self-control. Lent is one way to combat this.

According to the international Leader Character framework, there are eleven “character strengths” important for human wellbeing and good leadership. These include virtues like justice, accountability, courage, and good judgment. Researchers have used this framework to perform thousands of studies on teams and groups of people around the world. These studies show that, almost without exception, temperance is the weakest virtue in every team everywhere. (Not quite every person – each team has one or two members with strong temperance, but temperance is still weakest on average for a group).

The modern world is not only intemperate: it actively encourages the opposite: immediate gratification of desires. Every day we are bombarded with online ads, posters, and TV commercials that tell us to ‘Indulge yourself’; ‘treat yourself’, ‘look after yourself’, along with images of sensually pleasing people and objects. It is a rare advert that appeals to your calm rationality and long-term thinking. The advertising industry knows that it can make much more money from people who lack self-control. If it targets your basic animal impulses, then you are more likely to buy things you don’t need and wouldn’t have thought of without ad’s enticing promise.

Temperance is the power to choose what you won’t regret choosing later on.

Worse still, there are elements of Western thought that praise intemperance as a virtue and pathologize restraint as a psychological disorder. Elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, popularised in the media, suggest that you do damage to your mental health if you suppress your desires or try to hide them. It is far healthier to give free rein – to sexual desire first of all, but to all desires in the end. Temperance is no longer a virtue to be admired, but a neurotic vice that fills your subconscious with envy, bitterness, and psychological problems.

What is temperance anyway and why is it a problem if we lack it?

Temperance is self-control. It is acquired by self-discipline. Its purpose is to organise and order your many desires, giving priority to the ones that matter most to you. Let’s say you want to lose weight, and you also want to eat that doughnut you can see in the shop window. Or you want to save money to buy a house, but you also want that new and larger TV screen. Those are competing desires. Temperance is the power to choose what you won’t regret choosing later on. It doesn’t tell you what you ought to choose: it simply gives you control over your desires so you rule over them instead of them ruling you.

What does lack of temperance look like? Whenever you keep doing something you wish you didn’t keep doing, you are being intemperate. I don’t mean one-time actions that you later regret. I mean things you know you’ll regret even before you do them, yet you still do them. Things like: smoking (for most people), eating too much, browsing Instagram or TikTok instead of working, failing to show up for gym class. It can also mean any kind of procrastination: avoiding doing a task you know you have to do but don’t want to do ‘now’. In sum, it reveals a disorganisation in your priorities and goals, so a lesser priority subverts a higher priority because it’s more immediately available and enjoyable.

We need temperance if we’re going to be happy with where our lives are going

The problem with lacking temperance is that it undermines your own goals for your life and makes your future self a helpless victim of your present self. It leads to a downward spiral of the heart of intemperance is that some desire, some pleasure, some indulgence, has gained so much power over our life that we no longer have control over it. It is in the driving seat, not us. Intemperance is also a cause of self-hatred and low self-esteem. One of the best ways to feel better about yourself is to set long term goals and stick to them. It makes you feel like you’re heading somewhere good.

By contrast, the heart of temperance is to subordinate everything we think, feel, and enjoy to our will, our clear-headed decisions about the kind of person we want to be in the long-term. We need temperance if we’re going to be happy with where our lives are going. Temperance is even needed for worldly success. Warren Buffett once said, “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble.”

Why is temperance so lacking in our own time? I can think of at least two reasons.

First, we are one of the wealthiest societies ever to exist. Wealth may have benefits, but it also enables us to get what we want, when we want it. Wealthy people are less used to having their desires unsatisfied than poor people. Unfulfilled longing is a less common occurrence for the rich, so there is little natural opportunity to exercise the muscle of self-denial.

Secondly, we are one of the least religious societies ever to have existed. In contrast to secularism, religion has always had practical tools to cultivate temperance. All major world religions have ritual practices of fasting and feasting designed to exercise and strengthen self-discipline. Every year Muslims endure the gruelling discipline of Ramadan. Orthodox Christians restrict themselves to a vegan diet during the forty days of lent, and many other Christians give up some indulgence. Both rich and poor share alike in this voluntary self-denial. Now that these practices are eroding away, they are being replaced not by other self-discipline practices, but by the worship of I-want-it-here-and-now. This is shown most poignantly in the 2000 movie Chocolat, which explicitly puts up sensual indulgence in competition to traditional religion and abstinence – and indulgence wins.

But the decline of religion has done more than this: it has also undermined the sense of transcendent purpose in many people’s lives – which was what motivated them to look beyond their physical desires. Without hope and without a larger sense of meaning to life, people have less reason to sacrifice short-term pleasures for the sake of longer-term goals.

Nor are sensual desires the only way we can be intemperate. An outburst of rage on social media is a sign of intemperance.

I don’t mean that short-term pleasures are always bad, or that sensual desire is evil in itself. The whole point of temperance is that it involves the right amount, and not too much, of something good. That is what makes it so tricky. If eating a doughnut was like stealing or violence, we would have a stronger voice telling us not to do it. But because it’s not bad in itself, we find it harder to resist. We need temperance to say no to something good when we’ve already taken enough of it, so we don’t take too much.

Nor are sensual desires the only way we can be intemperate. An outburst of rage on social media is a sign of intemperance. A father who spends too long in the office and not enough time with his children is being intemperate. He is sacrificing the long-term goal of healthy family relationships for the short-term goal of career success. We lack the self-control to express our anger in the right place at the right time.

Temperance is needed for so many of the other virtues to function. If you’re not temperate, then you will be late for meetings, fail to deliver work on time, or makes too many commitments that you can’t keep. You’ll be a liability to your friends and colleagues.

Temperance doesn’t tell you what you should aim for in life. But no matter what you aim for, you won’t get it without temperance. So, what are you giving up for lent?