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

Development

8 March 2024

6 min read

Flourishing a way out of poverty

Is it just for rich people who have nothing to worry about other than feeling a bit happier?

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

Beside a shack in a rubbish dump, a man wearing a black shirt and bare foot sits on a stool and looks around.

Bill Wegener on Unsplash.

Humankind stands at a crossroads today. Still emerging from the aftermath of a global pandemic, the world is faced by monumental environmental, social and political challenges. Extreme weather events, floods and food poverty are no longer only on our screens affecting poor people in countries far away; screens that we in the global North were able to switch off after a momentary sigh of compassion before getting on with our lives. Some of us are starting to feel the impacts of planetary change and have financial struggles too. But they haven’t really affected us that much yet. We still have the time, space and luxury to ponder how we can improve our emotional and mental wellbeing – perhaps carve out some more “me time” or go on more walks in nature or keep a daily journal.

The shift from considering poverty and wellbeing simply in monetary terms to a broader, multi-dimensional understanding of these terms is not new. It began at the turn of the twenty-first century with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which aimed to tackle material poverty but also access to health, education and water and sanitation - the first united global effort to eradicate world poverty. In 2015 the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) replaced them, going further and also recognising the importance of environmental sustainability in realising poverty goals, as well as their interconnectedness.

In theory this all made perfect sense and since the MDGs were established in 2000, global poverty was on a declining trajectory for a number of years. However, progress towards eliminating world poverty has been slowing down since 2013. And since Covid in 2020, progress towards the SDGs has stalled with most recent reports showing a rise in the number of people living in extreme poverty for the first time since records began. If present trends persist, by 2030, a staggering 575 million people will remain in extreme poverty and 84 million children will be uneducated.

A bleak picture. With the global machinery signed up to reduce world poverty (and that’s not even bringing the COP Climate Change talks into the mix), how have we got to this point? By diversifying our attempts to improve human wellbeing, have we taken our focus off eliminating basic, grinding economic hardship? Or conversely, is it too little too late? Did our historic focus on economic development rather than equitable human wellbeing sow the seeds of inequality and planetary disruption that we are now reaping? Should we actually go further? And as the timeframe to achieve the SDGs narrows, there are calls for the next set of human development goals to be more overtly focussed on human flourishing.

When you are doing your best to survive, perhaps thriving isn’t top of the priority list.

Human flourishing is the state of optimal functioning and wellbeing across all aspects of an individual’s life and their community. We flourish when we live with purpose; when we practice gratitude, forgiveness, and open-mindedness.

A group of experts from Harvard have proposed five sets of Global Flourishing Goals to lead on from the SDGs, including striving for meaning, purpose and life satisfaction, ending economic hardship, social and political cohesion as well as protecting biodiversity. Likewise, the Christian aid and development agency, Tearfund, has long been a proponent of viewing human wellbeing holistically. The Light Wheel is a tool to guide practical action that promotes seven different areas of wellbeing – such as material assets and resources, emotional and mental wellbeing, living faith, personal relationships - that in turn lead to whole life transformation and flourishing communities.

But what do the world’s poorest people think about this emphasis on flourishing? When you are doing your best to survive, perhaps thriving isn’t top of the priority list. Who cares about life satisfaction and fulfilment when you are struggling to feed your children a daily meal of rice and beans? Is the concept of flourishing for rich people who have nothing to worry about other than feeling a bit happier? Is this the right track for global human Development?

“Poverty is lack of freedom, enslaved by crushing daily burden, by depression and fear of what the future will bring.”

“Poverty means working for more than 18 hours a day, but still not earning enough to feed myself, my husband, and two children.”

These are quotes from a landmark World Bank study, Voices of the Poor; an unprecedented millennial effort to gather the views, experiences, and aspirations of more than 60,000 poor men and women across sixty countries. The study presented the realities of poor people’s lives through their own voices. How do they view poverty and wellbeing? What are their problems and priorities?

Although poverty is rarely about one thing, for the world’s poorest, the bottom line was and always will be hunger - the lack of food. As expected, human wellbeing without the basic building blocks for survival - food and water – is impossible. Better health and access to education were also priorities. However, it seems that having enough materially for a good life is asking for relatively little. “But at least for each child to have a bed, a pair of shoes, a canopy over their heads, two sheets—not to sleep like we do on the ground.”

But the responses were much broader than a desire for material and basic needs to be met. Many of the expressions of wellbeing were about relationships; social and emotional wellbeing were acutely important. Harmony within the family unit and wider community, close and reliable friendships, helping one another. Wellbeing also had important psychological dimensions for those interviewed, such as the desire for dignity and respect, to feel better about oneself, to maintain a spiritual life.

When people were asked to rank the institutions most important in their daily lives, local churches scored well because they offer spiritual support as well as material assistance in times of need, also serving to strengthen communication between the various groups in the community. Community cohesion matters to the poorest. And relationships are at the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

So can you flourish your way out of poverty? If we mean the UN definition of extreme poverty, and if flourishing means wellbeing in all aspects of life, then probably no. The poorest people in the world, like the rest of us, need the minimum building blocks of life to survive before they can thrive here on Earth.

But from a Christian perspective the new Development discourse around flourishing is moving in the right direction. In John’s Gospel in the Bible, Jesus is clear that he came “that we may have life, and have it to the full”. When Jesus refers to a full “life”, he means the assurance of eternal life that comes through a faith in Jesus Christ. To truly flourish in our Earthly life, the hope of eternal life with Jesus is the critical aspect of wellbeing – it is what sustains and strengthens us as humans as we live our life on Earth. This is the great equaliser between the rich and the poor. The poorest people often see this far more clearly than the rich who have less need for God and an eternal life where – as it says in the Bible - there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain and all will be new.

“We may be poor in material things, but we are rich in the eyes of God.”(Voices of the Poor, 2000)

Of course it depends what weight you put on the spiritual aspect of flourishing, but perhaps on balance, those we consider to be the poorest on Earth are actually far closer to human flourishing – to having a “full life” - than we are.