Do good deeds come back to bite us?

Sorry to say, but your analogy is a poor one.

There is no proof that doing action A has any causality or influence to affect an action B.

Also, if a company knowingly makes a defective product and someone blows the whistle on them, and then the subsequent negative market forces put a lot of people out of work after the fact, then the gating 'bad' event is the company making the unsafe product in the first place...not the actions of the whistle-blower. Whose to say that the market wouldn't have discovered this without the whistle-blower's help?
He did the right thing by calling attention to the powers-that-be that a deadly or harmful event was being covered up. In its nature, that can't be a wrong thing ethically or morally to do.

Continuing in a general discussion, all this hinges on your belief of the concept of Karma. Also, it hinges on whether or not you employ logic or scientific cause-and-effect about life's events. If observation of random events (and judging of them) has/have any bearing on what you're willing to accept, you'll dismiss these as mere coincidence.

Bad Analogy:
Faith healing and the causality of people getting well spontaneously...and those that believe in it and call it an act of God...is about having religious faith. You either have faith or you don't. However those that are claiming God or a Supreme Being are being healed by God are dancing to the tune of the improvable.

{Edit: I know this poorly written. anyone following me here?}

It sounds like you're justifying doing the wrong thing.

In this case, the company could have fixed the defect when they first became aware of it so no one would be hurt, and they would not have gone out of business.

They were too cheap/lazy/unethical to do what was right in the first place.

Nodding with approval.

BTW, I understood perfectly what you said.

Tnx, Chai for your reassurance. I felt uncertain as to how well written or well thought out what I wrote was. In my head I knew what I wanted to say/write. When I've had coffee as late as I just did, I have a tendency to drift a bit.

In a perfect world, you'd be right. Yes, the companies leaders created the problem to begin with. Most employees wouldn't know that the product they're making was unsafe. The employees are all there to make a living, that is how important a job is, even if they unknowingly working for a bunch of unethical bastards covering up their defects. In the meantime, people are buying this product with an 'unknown to the public' risk. This money pays the employees. Yes, they work at what they believe to be a legitimate job and yes, they actually don't. But that doesn't reduce the importance of that job. The whistleblower does the correct action. The correct action helps a lot of people (cause and effect) but it also hurts a lot of other similarly innocent people in lost jobs (cause and effect). The good deed certainly turned their lives negative, as they still had a job before the whistleblower showed up. I agree the whistleblower isn't a 'bad' guy, but to the people who lost their job, I'd say it's unlikely they'd view him/her as a 'good' guy.

The question if whether the market would've eventually found out is totally irrelevant. The whistleblower made sure of that. What if's only happen after the fact anyways. And trust me, this has nothing to do with my faith or karma or any of that. Thanks for the insight btw.

I'm not justifying anything. Just asking a question.

They must with enough frequency to have produced the saying: "No good deed goes unpunished."

This is faulty logic:
Once again, the company's awareness of such a dangerous product and allowing the product to stay on the market where harm came to consumers was the only issue that can be called 'negative' . What your also confusing is actually about the issues of morality and ethicality. The downturn to the economic welfare of the people and their losing their jobs was not caused by the whistleblower. It's collateral damage and does not hold a candle to the culpability of the company and their awareness of potential harm to the consumer.

And I wasn't attcking you, so don't be defensive.

But the premise is that you are assuming/justifying that the company would consciously not do what was needed to fix the problem and avoid injuries by preempting the expected injury.

What I'm saying is that you can't always go to the end result, then back up just one step to find the culprit.
You have to get to the source of the problem, which was the company not doing the right thing in the first place.

They did wrong, and so in the end, wrong was done to them (business closing) and others (people losing jobs, injuries to customers, etc)

It's easy to point fingers at the most immediate target, i.e. the whistle blower, but no whistle would have been blown if there was nothing wrong.

The justification is that we need a scapegoat, and Mr. Whistle Blower is an easier and more assessible target that Gigantor Corp. So, we'll just pretend the whisle blower is the cause of the losses. We justify that it would be too much work to punish the real wrongdoer, when an easy target is standing right there.

In fact, your comment above is a good example of the same thing "I'm not justifying anything, I'm just asking a question"

Yes, I understood all along you were just asking a question, and I was just answering it.

For a reason I'm unaware of, you felt the need to express some sort of negative meaning to my answer. Perhaps because you want to believe good deeds come back to bite you in the ass, and you didn't like having to think deeper, going back to the source of the problem. I don't know, only you do at this point.

What you did with me was attempt to put the onus on me for giving an answer you may not have liked, so instead of remembering that if you ask a question, the answers are out of your control, you chose to make it sound that I was making you justify something.

The company who failed because of a faulty product they chose not to fix loves it that a scapegoat/whistler blower has been chosen to blame. You perhaps didn't like my answer, so it's my fault you didn't like it.

Bottom line:
The whisler blowers good deed didn't come back to bite him, the companies negligence came back to haunt them.

good and bad intertwine like lovers