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.

Many of this blog's readers will know by now about the sex abuse allegations involving a former football coach at Penn State (where I'm a student). If you haven't heard about it, take a look at this excellent summary of the allegations. You can also read the grand jury report, which first made this whole thing public, at that page, or via the New York Times.

What I find most, um, "interesting" about this is how many of the reactions to the scandal don't tell you to do just that.

I don't often talk about ethical issues because they're messy business, and this story, in particular the role that Joe Paterno plays in it, is a perfect example of why. Paterno is the heart and soul of Penn State. He's been working at the school for 61 years, helping it grow academically and athletically every step of the way. You can't argue with the fact that he has done a tremendous amount of good for the university, and the students and alumni are definitely justified in loving him for it. Heck, even though I'm not a football fan in the slightest, I can see the positive impact he's had on a daily basis, and I hated to see him unceremoniously dumped out on the lawn (so to speak) by the board of trustees.

But because of their devotion to JoePa, many people are letting their emotions do the talking, which tends to lead to incoherent arguments (MOAR YELLING) instead of constructive discussion. To be honest, the contents of the grand jury report is not exactly in his favor. The report isn't entirely clear, but it does seem that Paterno knew that something fishy was going on under his watch, something that was bad enough to be investigated and prosecuted, and there's a solid argument that he had a responsibility to make sure the appropriate outside authorities got involved. Yes, he reported it to the people in charge at the university, but they didn't handle the incident properly. Paterno had a chance to make up for that, and he didn't.

Still, though, assuming that's what happened, Coach Paterno isn't the only one at fault, not by a long shot. I mean, the man didn't even do anything illegal! Just as he had a responsibility to make sure outside authorities got involved, so did everyone else who knew about the abuse and was in a position of responsibility — from Mike McQueary, the man who witnessed the act, all the way up to the university president, Graham Spanier. I think what bothers me most about this whole episode is the inconsistency of how the punishments have been applied. McQueary still has his job, which strongly suggests that whatever the trustees were thinking, it was not about purging employees who failed to uphold Penn State's values of integrity and honesty. So why exactly was JoePa fired, then? For all they say about it being "in the best interest of the university," it kind of feels like a PR stunt. But I can't be sure.

The bottom line is that these events happened years ago, and a lot of factual evidence is lost to the mists of time and closed-door meetings. While it certainly seems that Sandusky did some horrible things, it's a lot harder to know for sure who else should have done something about it. I can imagine situations that are compatible with the available evidence in which everybody who was fired should have been fired, and situations in which none of them did anything particularly wrong. There are no obvious conclusions. Granted, a lot of scientific research is like that, but in this case there's no experiment we can run and no logical argument we can construct to figure out definitively who should be blamed for what.

Thankfully, there are a lot of people who realize that it doesn't do any good to get carried away pointing fingers. Instead, let's focus on continuing all the great work that Penn Staters are already doing to build up the reputation of this university. The "we" in "we are Penn State" encompasses 40000 undergrads and 15000 grad students (everyone seems to forget us), plus faculty and staff, at University Park alone, as well as many more at branch campuses all around the state, who want no part of this whole incident even as they stand behind the name of their school. That's the kind of community I'm proud to be a part of, scandal or not.