You work for a PR Firm that represents pharmaceutical giant PharMedCo. The drug company has an herbal medicine used successfully in Europe to lower blood pressure. PharMedCo wants to sell it in the United States. It is planning a major national promotion, generating large fees for your firm. It wants to use "third-party strategy," hiring key opinion leaders in the medical world to help get the word out and create a buzz by talking up the advantages of herbal products, but they would not push PharMedCo's new herbal medicine directly. In doing some research, you discover a little-known piece of information: if the herb is used in combination with another over-the-counter drug, it can be abused to get high. Yon tell PharMedCo, but it wants you to go ahead without informing the third-party experts, who might possibly back out or even warn the public. What should you do?

This is a classical good versus evil situation. If you want to behave correctly then you should warn the public about the possible harmful uses of the medicine.

Another way to see this situation is to balance benefits and costs. If the company sells the medicine it will make lots of money, I will probably make some money but not that much (compared to the millions PharMedCo will make). That is my sole benefit of not telling anyone. But the potential costs could be catastrophic.

If an scandal breaks out, not only PharMedco would be involved, I would probably be involved also due to prior knowledge of the potential harms. That could be very costly to my PR Firm because we could be involved in potential lawsuits and would lose other clients due to the bad reputation.

If I decided to become a whistle blower, then I could even get a larger benefit, my reputation for integrity would skyrocket. That would lead to getting more clients, so at the end I would make more money. I should start looking for a whistle.