Ever since the story of the sex abuse scandal and coverup in Penn State’s football program broke last Saturday, there has been a lot of attention focused on Joe Paterno’s role in it, specifically regarding whether he deserved to be punished for failing to report the incident to the police.

There have also been a lot of people saying that it’s wrong to be devoting so much attention to the coach when we should be focusing on the victims and using this as an opportunity to increase awareness of child abuse prevention. They are right, of course. To their credit, many Penn State students are doing just that, between holding a candlelight vigil tonight and encouraging everyone to wear blue at this weekend’s football game.

But there is a sense in which I think it’s worth talking about Paterno’s role. Not because of his celebrity, but because he is the “everyman” in this incident. Many of us could imagine ourselves being in much the same situation that he was when Mike McQueary told him what he saw. The question of Paterno’s guilt is a question of ethics that, in the quest to stop sex abuse, everybody needs to confront for themselves.

Suppose you have been told about, but have not personally witnessed, an incident of sex abuse. Is it your ethical duty to pass it up the chain of command, or to report it to the police? Or both? Should you be held responsible, along with everyone else who knew about it, for ensuring that the incident gets investigated and, if it turns out to be real, prosecuted?

What makes this a difficult decision is the fact that many organizations have a fairly strong chain of command, and whenever you have something relevant to the organization to report, the person above you in the chain (your boss) is the first place to go. Then they tell their boss, and so on, until it reaches someone who is qualified to either deal with it or decide that nothing needs to be done. And if they decide that nothing needs to be done, that’s that. It’s strongly discouraged to go above (or around) the people who you directly report to.

What Sandusky (allegedly - until the trial ends) did was extreme, though. I think we can all agree that the only way these allegations fall under the “nothing needs to be done” category is if they are entirely false, and even then there should be a proper investigation to determine that. So when Paterno reported the allegations and still saw Sandusky walking around campus, with no word that anybody had investigated, it seems that he had reason to suspect that the appropriate response had not been taken.

The presence of whistleblower protection laws is a sign that as a society, we lean toward putting responsibility on each individual who knows about a strongly illegal act. If you know about something, it’s your ethical duty to make sure the news reaches the proper authorities, even if it means going outside the normal chain of command (and it usually does). It’s certainly hard to imagine myself doing that, but of course the right thing to do is often not easy, which is why the laws offer some degree of protection for those who come forward.

However, even though we protect reporting of illegal activites to external authorities, we don’t legally require it. Maybe we should, though. There has been a lot of talk about how JoePa fulfilled his legal duty, but not his ethical duty. Why aren’t those the same thing? After all, one of the purposes of having laws is to codify ethics. Perhaps this is a signal that we need to change our laws to match our beliefs.