THE RIGHT THING: HOW FREE ARE FREEBIES?

Whenever I stay at a particular hotel in downtown Madison, Wisc., I know that I don't have to worry about remembering to pack shaving cream, toothpaste or other basic toiletries to use on the road. The desk clerk routinely offers me such sundries upon check-in.

So I understood the basic context of an e-mail from a reader in North Carolina who has an ethical quandary involving this sort of freebie.

A former colleague of my reader's is a volunteer for an organization that provides food and shelter to homeless people during the winter. The colleague sent my reader and others an appeal for donations of small, sample-size containers of goods such as soap, shampoo, toothpaste, razors and shaving cream.

"While his appeal noted that such items can be purchased inexpensively," my reader writes, "it also pointed out that, since they are available at hotels and motels, we should bring them back when traveling or on vacation."

My reader normally leaves any unused "freebies" at the place he's staying. He reflects that, while hotels may consider the disappearance of these goods to be "part of the cost of doing business," perhaps "other travelers would rather have lower room rates than, in effect, contribute to a cause they don't care about."

His question: "Is it ethical to collect these items for the purpose of donating them to this worthwhile cause?"

Many hotels, in an effort to be perceived as more environment-friendly, have taken to asking guests whether they want their towels laundered daily. So far, though, they've yet to give guests the option of choosing a lower room rate if they don't use the free shampoo and soap, although it's a novel cost-saving idea.

Unlike the linen, towels or alarm clocks placed in hotel rooms for a guest's use during their stay _ and only during their stay _ bars of soap and bottles of shampoo are consumable. If there are two bars of soap in the bathroom, one on the sink and another in the shower, and a guest decides to unwrap only one and save the other for later use, given that the hike from the sink to the shower is not exactly arduous, he is not using more than the hotel has given him for personal consumption. If, like many travelers, he returns home with an occasional bar of unused hotel soap packed among his belongings, it seems like a worthy endeavor to donate such goods to a not-for-profit that can put them to good use.

My reader's ex-colleague goes too far, however, when he suggests that travelers set out to collect more than was intended for use during their individual hotel stay. Saving a bar of soap intended for personal use is one thing, but grabbing a handful from a maid's cart is quite another.

As I have often said in this column, if you've obtained something wrongly, it doesn't matter what you do with it, it's still wrong. Robbing from the rich is still robbing, whether you give it to the poor or blow it in Las Vegas. That applies to money, valuables and even, yes, little bars of soap.

The right thing for the shelter to do is to request that individuals donate toiletries that they either have purchased on their own or have been given for their own use. It should not encourage the wrongful acquisition of such items, regardless of how noble its intentions.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: CASH FOR CRITICS?

While 72 percent of readers responding to an informal poll on my column's blog questioned the credibility of reporters who accept free travel to cover their industries, many who wrote in agreed with the 20 percent of readers who believed that an honest reporter can nevertheless maintain his or her objectivity under such circumstances. Granted, some respondents had a vested interest in the issue.

"If you don't want the writers to get handouts from the industry they are reviewing," writes Penney A. of Columbus, Ohio, "then you need to find another way to pay their way. If not, then you will be left with `free' reviews from online people who may really have an agenda to promote their company!"

As a travel writer, Rob R. of California struggles with this question a great deal.

"I certainly make an effort to pay my expenses whenever possible," he writes. "There is simply no way I would be able to do my job without accepting free travel or accommodation from some of the places I am writing about ... The alternative would allow only independently wealthy people ... to become travel writers."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: A FRENCH COVER-UP

Recently President Nicolas Sarkozy of France told his country's parliament, "The burqa is not welcome on French territory." He referred to that garment, worn by some Muslim women to cover their entire bodies, as "a sign of enslavement and debasement."

According to The Wall Street Journal, some Muslim groups objected, saying that such a stance could be taken as anti-Islamic. Sarkozy replied that he does not view the burqa as a religious symbol.

Was Sarkozy out of line to express his disapproval of a garment whose use is largely limited to female members of a particular religious group? Or was he correct in calling attention to the larger issue he identified?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll with this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: SHOULD SHE LET THE CAT OUT OF THE BAG?

A board member at a cat-rescue shelter confided in one of my readers that, during the past six months, six cats had been allowed to starve to death at this "non-kill," not-for-profit shelter.

"The cats wouldn't eat," my reader reports, "and the employees and management made no effort to locate foster homes which might have mitigated the problem. These poor cats, once people's pets, died painful, lonely deaths in their cages, basically not attended to properly, if at all."

My reader, who has volunteered at the shelter for the past year, feels compelled to blow the whistle to her local media about the starved cats who suffered such painful and inexcusable deaths. Her goal, she writes, would be to shed light on how poorly the shelter is run. She fears, however, that such publicity would cause donations to the center to dry up.

She has a bigger worry, though: The shelter's board members have signed a "loyalty oath" promising not to disclose any information about shelter operations to anyone not a member of the board, on penalty of dismissal. If she contacts the media, she fears, it will be clear who told her the facts and her informant will be removed from the board.

This board member, who is facing personal financial troubles, occasionally receives free care for the nearly dozen cats she looks after. Losing her seat on the board, and the free or at-cost medical care from the shelter, would be a hardship.

"Do I just go to the media," my reader asks, "and let the chips fall where they may?"

If her informant is then dismissed from the board, my reader wants to know if she is ethically obliged to assume her vet bills.

"Deep inside I know I am, aren't I?" she asks.

My reader clearly has competing issues here. The biggest question is whether her concern for the shelter cats' well-being should outweigh her concern about her informant's possibly getting in trouble _ and losing medical care for her own cats _ as a consequence of revealing the conditions at the shelter. And, of course, she's worried that speaking up on the cats' behalf might hurt the shelter's donations ... which would be bad for the cats.

If my reader's concerns are justified and her information is correct, both of which seem to be the case, she has an obligation to act. Her informant _ both as a board member and as a personal protector of cats _ the rest of the board and my reader herself, as a shelter volunteer, are united in their desire to help cats. Letting this situation continue would be unjustifiable for all concerned, which is probably why her informant mentioned the matter in the first place.

My reader should confront the board, but not until she has enlisted the assistance of those in the community who would help her to do so. If this means going to the local media with the story, she should not hesitate to share her evidence of wrongdoing.

Her informant may be exposed, but she's already been compromised: As a board member, she should have used her position to call attention to the deplorable conditions. The welfare of the shelter's cats must be a higher priority at this stage.

And my reader has absolutely no obligation to assume her informant's vet bills. Doing the right thing does not imply personal responsibility for anyone who may suffer as a result. If she feels sorry for the cats and wants to help out, she obviously can do so, but it's a matter of choice, not obligation.

Will airing of the shelter's problems hurt donations? Probably, but hopefully the shelter's board, whether the same board or a new one, will make every effort to demonstrate that these problems are in the past. In any event, to allow donors to unknowingly contribute to a poorly run shelter that negligently kills cats would be unconscionable.

Everyone involved with the shelter has a responsibility to hew to the mission of the organization, which is to protect the welfare of the cats under the shelter's care. The right thing for my reader, her informant and the rest of the board to do is to make sure that cats are not starved or mistreated while in their care. Any other political, financial or personal issues must be secondary.

If they cannot do this, then they have no business running an organization of this nature.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: WHEN THE BOSS ASKS FOR MORE

A reader has a part-time, hourly job with a six-month contract that is due to expire within a month. Her contract calls for her to work 20 hours a week, but from the very start she has been clocking in from 32 hours to 38 hours a week.

Before committing to the job, she had told her boss that she planned to take a vacation _ her honeymoon, in fact _ a few weeks into the job. As the time for her honeymoon drew near, however, her boss asked her to move back the date of her vacation. She agreed, and rescheduled the trip for a few months later.

When the newly appointed time for her honeymoon rolled around, her boss again asked my reader to move it. Again she complied.

"Now," she writes, "I plan to take my honeymoon in four months, about three months after the end date of my current contract."

Even though her contract is soon to expire, however, her boss talks as if she will still be on the job in three months, despite the fact that no new contract has been signed or negotiated.

My reader is starting "to feel taken advantage of," she writes. "I figured that it would be legitimate for me to make vacation and other plans after the end date of the contract, since the company had no legal obligations to me. What sort of ethical obligations do I have to stay here and re-sign the contract and make my plans around this job?

"And what does this sort of behavior say about my boss's ethics?"

To answer the second question first, this boss is apparently someone who asks her employees, even her part-timers, to alter their plans to meet the needs of the company. There's nothing wrong with that. The boss's job is to see that the company's needs are met and if, as in this case, the employee agrees to adjust her plans, it's reasonable for the boss to assume that the adjustments are OK with her.

Nothing that my reader tells me suggests anything unethical about her boss's behavior. She may be demanding, self-interested and lacking in empathy for the personal needs of her employees, but that doesn't make her unethical.

Moving on to the first question, my reader has absolutely no obligation, ethical or otherwise, to continue with the company after her contract is up, let alone to rearrange her life plans accordingly. The whole point of a short-term contract is that neither party is bound beyond the short term.

That she even raises the question suggests that my reader's real problem is that she has trouble saying no to her boss. If it's the boss's job to see to the company's needs, it's the employee's job to see to her own needs.

Particularly in this case, when my reader had told her boss about her honeymoon plans even before signing the initial contract, there is no ethical constraint to prevent her from declining to make adjustments to her plans that go beyond the agreed-upon terms of her contract. When the boss asked if she could reschedule the first time, she should have said no.

Granted, some employees have a hard time viewing their boss's requests as mere requests. The power differential creates an intimidation factor, even if the boss has no intention of coming across that way.

Nonetheless, an employee shouldn't expect his or her boss to be a mind-reader or an advocate for employee rights. A request is a request and, particularly when the parameters of the relationship are laid out contractually, there's nothing wrong with respectfully declining requests that don't fit within an employee's outside plans.

The right thing for my reader to do is to be honest with her boss. She should call her attention to the fact that their contract is about the expire, and that her future employment there is not a given. If, as it seems, her boss still wants her services and if she still wants to work there, they should negotiate a new contract.

At that time she should make clear that she intends to take her twice-readjusted honeymoon as currently scheduled. And when the seemingly inevitable request for a postponement is made, she should respectfully decline to reschedule.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: DRINK UP ... TO A POINT

In an informal poll on my column's blog, 70 percent of participating readers believed that, when a restaurant offers free refills on drinks, a one-drink-per-person rule is implied, making it wrong to share a drink with someone else and then collect a free refill.

William Jacobson of Cypress, Calif., shares the majority view, which runs counter to the verdict previously expressed in my column.

"When you purchase a free-refills drink," Jacobson writes, "what you actually purchase is a cup and a license (privilege) from the restaurant to fill your cup with their drink. This privilege can be revoked for abuse. Sharing your drink with someone else abuses the common understanding of your agreement, so the restaurant is within its rights to stop you from further refills."

Louise Macaulay of Yorba Linda, Calif., disagrees. She has "never seen a Soda Nazi stationed by the beverage dispenser," she writes, so her guess is that management doesn't have a problem with sharing refills.

"Go ahead and have one free refill," advises Maggie Lawrence of Culpepper, Va. "Just don't be a pig."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: CLOSING A CLINIC

After Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas physician who operated an abortion clinic, was murdered by an anti-abortion zealot, his family decided to close the clinic. Some opponents of abortion were bothered by the decision, Stephanie Simon reports in The Wall Street Journal, because they feared that "extremists might conclude that violence gets results where legal protests don't."

What do you think? Does the family have an ethical obligation to find a way to keep the clinic open, to avoid having the murderer get what he wanted? Or is the doctor's family free to act as they see fit, regardless of the circumstances?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll with this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: DOING GOOD BADLY

When a child is stricken with a disease, it can be harrowing for all concerned. When that disease is rare, one with little ongoing funding for research, it can be even more devastating.

One of the partners in a firm where one of my readers works is facing such circumstances. To counteract the lack of funding, he has established his own foundation to fund research into this disease.
"All very laudable and understandable," my reader writes.

While the partner tries to keep his foundation work separate from his work for the firm, she adds, "there is some inevitable bleed-over, especially since the foundation's staff work in his firm's offices."

Even more bleed-over occurs when the foundation hosts its annual fund-raising dinner to raise money for its research fund. The firm's executives are invited to attend this black-tie event, but the rank-and-file employees are not given the same opportunity.

My reader understands that the partner cannot ethically extend an invitation to the fund-raiser to every employee. Doing so might make some employees feel that they were being coerced to give to this cause, even if they could not afford to do so. They might fear that, if they didn't give, their standing at the firm would be jeopardized.

Nevertheless, she says, by inviting only the executives, the partner breeds resentment among the uninvited, lower-tier employees, who already feel that the firm's management style is very "ivory tower, us-and-them."

"The perceived snub of this annual exclusion is like rubbing salt in a wound for some employees," my reader writes. "There is a great deal of quiet grumbling in the lunch room around the time of the event."

Is the partner handling this in an ethical manner?

There's nothing unethical in raising money to try to find a cure for a rare disease. My reader is right in finding the partner's desire to do so laudable.

The partner is also right in choosing not to put the rank-and-file employees in a position in which they might feel pressured to contribute to his foundation. In such a situation, whether they contributed or whether they didn't, hard feelings wood be inevitable.

By not keeping his foundation work entirely out of his workplace, however, he has created an impression that somehow the non-executive employees are less significant than his executive colleagues. He may intend only to spare the feelings of those who cannot afford his foundation's fund-raiser, but in reality he probably has no idea of who can afford what. In making this decision for them, he's making unfair assumptions about them.

So, if he's wrong to invite them and wrong not to invite them, what's the answer? Obviously he shouldn't put himself into this position in the first place.

In other words, his mistake lies in not keeping his work and his cause separate and clearly defined. If the foundation were a not-for-profit offshoot of the firm, it might be reasonable for its staff to share offices with the firm. If the other executives sat on the board of the foundation, it would make sense for them to get the pricey invites not sent to others at the firm.

Neither is the case, however, so the right thing for the partner to do is to draw a clear line between his work for the firm and his work for the foundation, starting by finding new office space for the foundation. That way, if others at the firm choose to contribute to the foundation or to participate in its annual events _ regardless of their rank in the firm's hierarchy _ they can do so on their own time and without any sense that their professional interests may somehow be involved.

The partner has done nothing wrong, in short, but he's done the right thing in the wrong way. It's time to straighten things out.¶

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: THROW THE BOOK AT HER?

Take a quick glance at the Web site of the American Library Association, and you'll get a sense of how very dire the state of funding for public libraries has become. Across the country budget shortfalls are threatening the ability of public libraries to keep their doors open. The overall funding picture is grim.

Yet these shortfalls come at a time when public libraries are experiencing record usage. According to the ALA's 2009 State of America's Libraries Report, nearly 1.4 billion visitors checked out more than 2 billion items in 2008. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has reported a substantial increase in usage in Canada. At a time when economic pressures make buying a book, upgrading a computer or even picking up a daily newspaper a meaningful expenditure, many people are rediscovering the rich resources of their public libraries.

Because of limited funds, however, it falls upon library managers to be more rigorous than ever about how they spend their money. Public libraries are, after all, taxpayer-supported institutions, and there are plenty of people keeping an eye open for any inappropriate use of funds.

A reader in New England has such a concern, even though she herself is a librarian. She's concerned that the longtime director of her city's public library may be using library funds inappropriately.

The director relies on public transportation to get to and from work. When the weather is particularly rough, however, she calls the library's custodian _ who is, of course, a city employee _ and has him drive the library van to pick her up and bring her to work. It's about a 10-mile round trip.

In the past the library trustees have offered to use library trust funds to pay for the director's transportation in inclement weather, but she has declined.

"The city probably doesn't know what the director is doing," my reader writes. "Most of the library staff are aware of this arrangement and disapprove, but feel powerless to do anything."

She wants to know if the director is behaving ethically and, if not, what can be done.

If the director had accepted the trustees' offer to pay for her transportation during inclement weather, there would be no ethical issue here. Taxpayers might groan about footing the bill, but the director would be in the clear as long as the arrangement was out in the open and accounted for.

But by turning down the offer and then making use of a library vehicle, and thereby incurring city expense, she is putting public services to private use without the consent of the library's trustees. And, yes, that's unethical.

The right thing for the director to do would be to inform the trustees that she is finding it difficult to get to work on some bad-weather days, and that she would like to reconsider their offer of a transportation allowance as part of her compensation.

Chances are that they would agree. Perhaps they'd even want to continue the current arrangement, which would make it perfectly acceptable. The key is not how she gets to work, but that any expenditure of public funds be aired and approved in advance.

If nobody on her staff can convince her to do this, or feels comfortable in making the attempt, then my reader _ ideally with a group of fellow employees _ should do the right thing and inform the board of the situation. It is the responsibility of the trustees to make sure that taxpayers' funds are being used appropriately and are being accounted for properly.

And, of course, the library staffers are also taxpayers and shouldn't be afraid to look out for their own interest.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: IN A DISASTER THERE ARE MANY NEEDS

In an unscientific poll on my column's blog, 69 percent of the readers who responded said that, if a natural disaster hit their town, they would turn down relief if they were not as hard hit as others in the region. But my readers didn't find a simple answer to the question.

"Of course a person is not entitled to relief from a disaster that spared him/her _ at least not in terms of food, blankets and other physical materials," writes Phil Clutts of Harrisburg, N.C. "However, assuming that person experienced the same dread as everyone else, empathized with his or her fellow citizens' pain and losses, and/or experienced a degree of inconvenience because of closed roads or businesses, say, I wouldn't fault him or her for accepting free tickets to events."

Cynthia Dodd of West Haven, Conn., agrees that "just being in a disaster area is traumatizing." She doesn't believe that "red tape" should be allowed to stop "the non-needy" from getting assistance if they deem it necessary.

"All in the town must experience mental stress as a consequence of the disaster," writes Paul Peacock of New York, "and clearly events to relieve that stress would be welcome."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: VINO VERITAS?

In his blog, "Dr. Vino," Tyler Colman recently revealed that writers for a well-known wine-industry newsletter, The Wine Advocate, had accepted paid trips to cover the industry. The newsletter's founder, Robert M. Parker Jr., has maintained the importance of paying his own way on such trips, The Wall Street Journal subsequently reported, but one of the writers racked up a $25,000 tab for travel, hotel and meals that was paid by Wine Australia.

Do such payments call into question a reporter's credibility, or do you think that an honest reporter can maintain his or her objectivity under such circumstances? Does it make a difference that Parker previously had stressed the importance of paying his own way to cover the industry?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll with this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: DRAWING A LINE IN THE WATER

A reader in North Carolina is trying to sort out the difference between "the sensible thing" and "the right thing" after hearing the story of a couple of newlyweds who are friends of his daughter.

One weekend the newlywed wife was alone on the couple's boat, moored at a pier, when she was approached by a much smaller boat with two people aboard. One of them, a woman, asked if she could use the bathroom on the larger boat. The newlywed said that it would be OK.

Once on board, however, the young woman said that she needed her boyfriend to come aboard as well, to bring her some personal necessities.

Again the newlywed wife agreed, and the boyfriend boarded. The newlywed wife felt, however, that the two were spending an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom.

At this point the newlywed husband arrived on the scene, and his wife explained the situation. He decided to investigate, and found that the guests were consuming drugs.

"Get off of my boat," he told them.

The visiting couple got belligerent and a fight ensued. The interlopers finally left, but the newlyweds weren't speaking because the husband was mad at his wife for letting them onto the boat in the first place.

My reader believes, however, that the husband is out of line, since his new wife's "kindly nature (is) part of what made her lovable to him in the first place."

There are two issues here, but only one of them has an ethical component.

Whether or not the newlywed wife should have let the strangers onto the boat isn't an ethical question. Courtesy is a matter of etiquette, and as such can and should be balanced with other considerations such as legal liability and personal safety. How one strikes this balance varies from person to person, and clearly the newlywed husband and wife set the boundaries somewhat differently.

There is no moral imperative here, though, so the question is not whether the husband or the wife has the right answer. His answer is probably more sensible, but that doesn't necessarily make it right.

The other question, the one my reader specifically asked, is whether the husband is justified in being angry at his wife. He would have acted differently than she did, but does that justify his losing his temper with her?

I'm pretty sure that, if I came aboard my boat and found a young couple doing drugs in the bathroom, I'd be angry. Fortunately, I don't own a boat.

My reader has a valid point here, however. While the young husband has every right to be angry, his anger seems misdirected: He should be upset with the couple who took advantage of his wife's hospitality, not at his wife herself. He did the right thing in kicking the drug abusers off his boat, of course, but his anger should have ended there.

Marriage imposes a complex series of ethical obligations, and one of them is that a family's basic policies must be arrived at through discussion, agreement and, when necessary, compromise. Neither party can assume that his or her view automatically prevails unless it's previously been discussed and agreed upon.

I'm guessing that the husband's anger derived in large part from adrenalin left over from the confrontation and from retrospective dismay at the possible harm to which his wife had been exposed. He doesn't want to see her hurt, and feels that she heedlessly put herself in jeopardy.

That's a reasonable point of view, but it's not the only one.

The right thing for him to do is to get past the initial confrontation, calm down and then discuss the matter with his wife. If she agrees that a policy of not allowing any strangers on the boat is a good idea, then that can be their policy. If she feels that hospitality is too important to her to be discarded simply because two individuals took advantage of it, and merely hopes to be more judicious in deciding who is and isn't allowed aboard in the future, that's also a reasonable point of view.

The important thing is that the policy be mutually agreed upon. Until it has been, the husband should try to avoid getting angry at his wife for being the kind of person he fell in love with in the first place.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: TYPHOID MARY AT THE RECEPTION DESK

"My company wants to discourage the use of sick days for financial and staffing reasons," a regular reader from Huntington Beach, Calif., writes.

At a time when many companies are exploring all options to trim costs, it's not surprising that some are looking at employee benefits for potential savings. As with many well-intentioned efforts, however, this one may have unintended consequences.

Her company has reduced the number of hours each employee is allotted for sickness each year, she reports. Employees are not permitted to accrue sick time and carry over hours into the following year.

Furthermore, to encourage employees not to use even the sick days they have, the company rewards them with a paid day off for every six months in which they have perfect work attendance.

"So now," my reader writes, "colleagues come in sick and spread their sickness to others."

My reader sees the new sick-day policy as shortsighted, in part because it pits co-workers against one another.

"An individual may well want an extra day off, rather than be home ill, but the rest of us don't deserve to risk exposure and sickness just for that person's pleasure," she writes. "Isn't this company policy unethical?"

It's natural for companies to reward employees for a desired behavior. Some companies have taken to rewarding employees who participate in wellness programs, for example. So offering employees an incentive to maintain perfect work attendance may be well intentioned, if company management sees it as an incentive for workers to take care of themselves better.

Where this policy goes awry, however, is that it also serves as an incentive for workers to retain their eligibility for the extra day by coming in even when sick. Workers who do so expose their co-workers to germs and risk spreading the illness within the company, which is obviously not something that management should want to encourage.

So the policy is flawed. But is it unethical?

It might be, but I believe that it isn't.

The question is one of intention: If management deliberately set out to entice sick workers to come in anyway, it's not only unethical but also counterproductive. An office can be crippled by an epidemic set off by one ailing worker showing up when he or she ought to have stayed home.

I don't believe, however, that this is the intention of the company's incentive program.

The elephant in the room here is that the company likely believes -- and rightly so, to judge by past surveys of my column's readers -- that workers are using sick days for reasons other than sickness. Management isn't trying to get sick people to come into work, but rather trying to get people who aren't sick not to call in sick.

That's a legitimate goal for the company to pursue, and thus the policy is not unethical, whether or not it has unintended consequences.

Part of the ethical responsibility here lies on the employees themselves. They should know that showing up to work while infected with a communicable illness is virtually never appropriate. Many of us are guilty of having done this very thing, of course, without thinking through how our choices might affect our co-workers. We should take time to rethink such behavior.

Nonetheless, if the company's new policy is actually causing employees who should be home sick to show up at the office instead, the company's managers do have an ethical responsibility not to ignore the situation.

The right thing for them to do is to reassess the program to see if this problem exists and, if so, how it can be addressed.

One solution might be to eliminate the six-months reward for individuals and instead reward all employees with an extra day if overall sick days are down at the end of the designated period. A solution that doesn't pit one employee's interests against another's is inherently better than one that does, because a team spirit is by definition better for the company's interests.

It's obviously possible for a program that is entirely ethical and conceived with the best of intentions to actually make things worse. That shouldn't stop companies from looking for solutions to their problems, but they should be prepared to evaluate the results and make the necessary adjustments if things go wrong.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: TARZAN, GUV OF THE JUNGLE?

A federal judge in Chicago has prevented former Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois from traveling to Costa Rica to appear in an NBC reality show called "I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!" Blagojevich is free on bail, but faces trial on corruption charges.

In an informal poll on my column's blog, 61 percent of the respondents disagreed with the judge, arguing that Blagojevich remains innocent until proven guilty and therefore should be allowed to make money in any legal fashion -- even if my readers don't seem to think much either of Blagojevich or of the show.

Shmuel Ross of Brooklyn, N.Y., finds the job offer fitting: "Given that Blagojevich is an accused criminal whose alleged crimes were committed while in public office," Ross writes, "he's a perfect choice for a network reality-television show."

"I would think that anybody hammered in the press for misdoings he did not commit would either want to keep a low profile until the trial or present facts that would vindicate him," writes Phil Clutts of Harrisburg, N.C.

"I wouldn't have a problem with Blago going to the jungles of Costa Rica if they'd give the show a more accurate name," writes another reader, who prefers to remain anonymous. "I suggest `I Think I'm Important -- Does Anybody Care?"'

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: DRINK AS MUCH AS YOU WANT?

Several weeks ago I wrote about a husband and wife who were eating at a restaurant that offered free refills on drinks. The husband wanted to know if it was OK to buy one drink to share with his wife and then refill it. His wife thought it was fine, but he had his doubts.

My take was that, so long as the company had no policy against it, it was fine for them to share the refillable drink. Readers were split on whether my advice held water.

So now I put the question to each of you: In a restaurant that offers refillable drinks, is it OK to buy one drink, share it with someone and then refill it? Or is a one-refillable-drink-per-one-person rule implied, even if not formally stated?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll with this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: NOW HEAR THIS ... LIKE IT OR NOT

A reader from Colorado is hearing more than he wants to hear.

He drives a company car, and the vehicle is equipped with a citizens' band radio to allow drivers to communicate with company headquarters and with other drivers. It is supposed to be used strictly for business, and in particular the company has a clear policy prohibiting "cussing" or the telling of any sort of "sexual jokes" over the CB radio.

"But they will not enforce these rules," he writes. "Do I have to continually listen to foul language in my workplace if I find it offensive? Whom do I talk to about this?"

There is a difference between etiquette and ethics, though many situations straddle that boundary. In many contexts this would simply be an issue of etiquette: It's rude for anyone to indulge in obscene language or offensive jokes within the hearing of anyone who might object. If my reader was sitting in a bar and was being subjected to objectionable conversation from the next table, he could rightly condemn the offenders as rude.

In this case, though, there's an added component that makes this an ethical issue, and his fellow drivers' conduct not merely rude but wrong.

A workplace is not a bar, and the public airwaves are not any old workplace. What goes over the radio -- including over CB frequencies -- in the United States is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, and its provisions about "permissible communications" for CB users clearly prohibit "obscene, profane or indecent words, language or meaning."

By using profanity and telling obscene jokes over their CB radios, my reader's co-workers are not only being rude to him and to who knows how many others within range of their transmissions, but also they are probably in violation of FCC regulations. The penalties for such violations range from cease-and-desist orders to hefty fines or imprisonment. And because they are doing this as representatives of their company, they are exposing the company to potential liability as well, the way a casual obscenity uttered by the singer Bono on live television got NBC in trouble, though nobody suggested that the network had caused his remark or even had known it was coming.

By using the company's own radios to place it in jeopardy, his co-workers are being not only rude but also, yes, unethical.

For that reason, my reader shouldn't have to wait for the FCC to intervene in his situation. Since the company itself is at risk because of this conduct, it should enforce its own policy against such misuse of company-owned CB radios.

The right thing for my reader to do is to tell his supervisor that, while he himself finds such utterances offensive, he is also concerned that they are placing the company in legal jeopardy. If his supervisor is one of the offenders, he should report his concerns to the company's human-resources department.

In either case, he is under no obligation to list the names of those who might be violating company policy. If company bosses want to know, they can tune in like anybody else.

The right thing for the company to do is to address his concerns. It should begin by monitoring the radio frequency on which company dispatches are made. The company should also make it clear to everyone who uses a company CB radio that monitoring is ongoing and that infractions of this company policy will not be tolerated, not only because they could result in hefty government fines but also because they are inappropriate in any workplace and shows a lack of respect for co-workers.

If the company refuses to address the issue, it should be ashamed. Furthermore, in that case my reader and others at the company would be fully within their rights to report the behavior to the FCC.

Whatever happened to the company thereafter would be its own fault for not living up to its own policies.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: QUARTER NEITHER ASKED NOR GIVEN

There's a terrific scene in "Superman: The Movie" (1978) in which Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve), looking for a place to change into his Superman costume, runs to a telephone booth ... and stops short, confronted by a pay phone on an open pedestal, rather than the once-ubiquitous telephone booth.

These days, thanks to the proliferation of cell telephones, he'd be hard pressed even to find the open-air variety of pay telephone. Pay telephones do still exist, however, even if most of us can't remember the last time we used one.

One of my colleagues, however, had a pay-telephone encounter a couple of years ago that still perplexes him ethically.

Stopping to use a sidewalk telephone in Long Beach, N.Y., he put in his quarter. No dial tone resulted, however, nor did he hear his quarter drop. He had encountered that now-seldom-seen monster, the quarter-eating telephone.

He was about to walk away when he realized that he could actually see the edge of his quarter inside the coin slot. Using a nail file, he found that he could hook the quarter and drag it back out of the slot.

Again he started to walk away, but then he noticed that another quarter had moved into the space previously occupied by his.

It would be equally easy to remove it, using the same technique, but he wasn't sure whether it would be the right thing to do.

On the one hand, he had already retrieved his own quarter and the other quarter clearly wasn't his.

On the other hand, it wasn't the telephone company's either, since it had been given to the company in exchange for a service that hadn't been provided. It belonged to some previous frustrated would-be caller whom my colleague had no way of contacting. Should the telephone company be rewarded for its poor maintenance of the pay telephone? It seemed to him that this was more or less like finding the money on the street, in which case finders keepers.

My colleague chose the second option and extracted the second quarter, whereupon a third quarter appeared. Applying the same logic he extracted that one, and a fourth appeared. He ended up with $2.25 in quarters beyond his own initial one.

Feeling uncomfortable with the situation, he reports, he gave them to some people running a church bake sale at a table down the street. He realizes, however, that simply giving the money to a charitable cause doesn't change the rights or wrongs of taking the coins in the first place.

"If I was ethically entitled to them, I can do whatever I want with them," he writes. "If I wasn't ethically entitled to them, then they aren't mine to give away."

He's right ... in his second observation. The quarters weren't his to give away. The right thing would have been to take the one that was his and then walk away.

My colleague did leave a note on the telephone, warning future potential users not to risk their quarters. If he felt empathy for the telephone company -- yeah, right -- he might also have called in, from a telephone that didn't eat his quarter, to report that the first telephone was on the blink.

As for taking the coins, it isn't the right thing because of the effort involved in extracting them. If he'd found the quarters resting atop the telephone, he might reasonably have pocketed them. "I found some quarters inside a pay phone" isn't the same thing. And, as he says, it doesn't matter whether he used the money to buy a Jaguar or to restore a blind orphan's sight -- it's irrelevant to the ethical question.

Small frustrations often cause us to do things that we know are not quite right. Does this mean that my colleague is not to be trusted? Hardly. I don't for a minute suspect that his pay-telephone episode suggests that he will drive away in someone else's sports car simply because he happens to see the keys in the ignition.

In this one small pay-telephone exchange, however, the right thing eluded him.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: MADONNA AND CHILD

While 75 percent of the readers responding to an unscientific poll on my column's blog feel that the singer/actress Madonna is entitled to privacy in matters such as adopting a child, most readers who commented believed that she has given up any such right.

"Until Madonna publishes a book entitled `Adoption' to follow up her auto-photographic book `Sex,"' one reader writes, "I think that she's foregone any right to privacy."

"Adoption should be private," another agrees, "but she chooses to put her life on display continually. She has a history of following fads and trends ... and leaving them behind once the cameras are gone ... By `outing' her in advance, perhaps we can save a child who likely will be adopted by a genuinely caring parent from becoming another of Madonna's moments."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: A HAND-OUT TO THOSE NOT SO MUCH IN NEED

Your town has been hit by a natural disaster. Many area residents have been evacuated from their homes, and outside support quickly arrives. At various spots around town, residents can receive free assistance ranging from blankets and clothing to food and tickets to performances and recreational outings. All you need to do is to show identification proving that you're a resident of the disaster-stricken town.

You've got the right identification, but as it happens your home was spared, you lost relatively little in the disaster and your life is continuing much as before. Still, free stuff is free stuff and no one is asking any questions.

Well, no one except me: Do you go to get some of the relief that's being offered to everyone in town? Or do you decide that, because you weren't as hard hit as others were, you'll pass?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll with this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: Minding Your Neighbor's Business?

A reader who is a member of the board of a condominium association in Ohio recognizes that, as a board member, he is responsible for making sure that the association's bylaws are followed.

One of those bylaws requires anyone buying a unit in the condo complex to pay $1,000 to the association's reserve fund. Wanting to know if a unit currently being rented to someone with an option to buy had actually been sold, the board member accessed the county auditor's Web site.

His search revealed that the unit had not been sold, so the association was not due the $1,000 fee. He discovered, however, that the condo's owner was receiving a 2.5-percent reduction in his property taxes because he stated that he occupies the unit ... which he does not.

This discovery leaves the board member in a quandary. Now that he has the information, what should he do with it?

"Is it ethical for me to notify the county auditor of the situation?" he asks. "Or would I be wrong in doing this?"

OK, no one likes a busybody. Few of us can stomach folks who stick their noses into other people's business. But an accidental discovery during a legitimate investigation is a different story from rummaging around looking for dirt.

So long as the board member did not break any laws by accessing the county auditor's site, he has every right to be concerned about what he found. If the condo owner is not paying the full property taxes due on the property, he is defrauding the community in which he lives, or in which he says he lives. That is not only illegal, but also unethical. His misrepresentation steals money from the community and forces others to pay more than necessary to run the local government's operations.

There is, of course, a risk that, if my reader fingers this owner, others in the condo association might turn out to be doing the same thing and, if so, surely wouldn't appreciate being called out.

That consideration should not stop him from reporting the scofflaw, of course. But the right thing for him to do, before reporting the condo owner, is to discuss the issue with his fellow board members. A good rule of thumb, when making an ethical decision, is to discuss the issue and possible responses with other stakeholders. They may offer valuable feedback both about the options in a particular situation and also about how it might affect the community more broadly.

The board might, for example, decide that it's time to remind all condo owners about the $1,000 purchase fee and also to point out that, if they are renting their units, they are not entitled to the tax reduction for residency. The board might feel that the best response is to tell the tax-ducking condo owner that the situation has come to the board's attention and that it will be reported unless he decides to report it himself -- and pay whatever back taxes are necessary -- by a specified date.

One thing my reader should make clear to the board, however, is that the option of not reporting the issue isn't on the table. If the board won't act on the matter as a group, he will do so as an individual.

Knowing that the law is being broken -- especially in this case, when the violation could directly affect the board's interests -- and doing nothing would make my reader and the rest of the board complicit in a situation that never should have happened in the first place. The question is not whether to sit on this information, in short, but only how to go about remedying it.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: HELPING THE PRIVILEGED POOR?

A reader from Orange County, Calif., is perplexed. A friend of hers has two children, and paid to send them to private schools from the time they were in preschool through their high-school years.

Now the friend is footing the college tuition for each child. Neither of the children has been required to hold even a part-time job while in college. The older child has earned some money from paid internships, but none of this money has been used to defray any of her education or living costs.

The mother continues to pay all expenses for each child, my reader writes, including "modest but brand-new cars, trips to Europe, the latest electronic gadgets and just about anything they may need or want."

My reader hastens to add that her friend and her friend's husband have worked very hard to provide for their children.

"Both kids are very nice, very respectful, and have never been in any kind of trouble," she writes. "So, while I would consider them privileged, I would not say that they are spoiled."

So where's the problem?

The daughter will soon graduate from college. Her mother is worried that, because of the current job market, she will not be able to find a job immediately after she graduates. Once she is no longer a full-time student, the daughter will not be covered by her parents' health-care plan.

"My friend is considering having her daughter apply for Medi-Cal," my reader writes, "rather than purchasing a private health-care plan for her daughter."

Medi-Cal is the state's Medicaid program that provides health-care coverage for low-income people, and my reader can't understand why, after spending so much money making sure that her children have the best of everything, she would consider drawing the line when it comes to their health care.

The answer, apparently, is simple economy: As we all know, health-care costs are high and rising, and her friend would rather not foot this particular bill.

My reader doubts that her friend will go the Medi-Cal route, but wonders whether I see any problem, from an ethical perspective, with her even considering it.

If the daughter qualifies for Medi-Cal, there is nothing ethically wrong with her applying for the coverage. Simply having lived a "privileged" life while under the care of her parents does not mean that she will never have to find her own way in the world, financially or otherwise. It's fair to assume that, even if she immediately finds a job, it won't be a high-income one, at least for awhile.

There's nothing in my reader's letter to suggest that the friend plans to continue showering her daughter with fancy electronics, new cars and trips to Europe. If she is planning to do that, then her daughter will not truly be low-income, so Medi-Cal would be inappropriate. Otherwise, there's no reason that the low-income daughter of high-income parents shouldn't take advantage of a program for low-income people.

Her parents might have considered easing their daughter's transition to self-sufficiency by asking her to contribute something toward her expenses during the course of her college career. But there is no ethical imperative that dictates how far parents should go in supporting their children financially. If they decide to pay for more extensive health-care coverage for her, or to lend her the money to enable her to do so for herself, that's OK. So is telling their daughter that, once she's out of college, she's on her own financially.

That these parents have been able to rear two respectful kids speaks well of their parenting skills. The right thing for them to do now, as their daughter prepares to graduate from college, is to speak with her about the responsibilities she will face as an independent adult and to lay out the options available to her. That's the kind of help that any good parent should offer and that any child should cherish.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO SPOOF

Does Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," have any obligation to do his daily send-up of the news in an accurate and well-researched manner, given that he is regarded as a journalist by many people? Yes, according to 36 percent of the readers who responded to an unscientific poll on my column's blog.

In a 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Stewart was named by 2 percent of respondents as the journalist they admired most. Katie Couric led at 5 percent. with Stewart tied with Tom Brokaw, Anderson Cooper and Brian Williams for fourth place.

"Perhaps," one reader writes, "Mr. Stewart could have a disclaimer at the beginning and end of each program: `Please don't be stupid enough to believe that everything you hear during this program is truthful."'

Not every reader is so caustic, however.

"Several of the people that I know who watch Jon Stewart do believe that they are getting the `real news,"' another writes, "from someone who is not afraid to `tell it like it is."'

Martin Maines of Middletown, Ohio, suggests that the real issue doesn't involve Stewart at all.

"(If) people can't tell the difference between him and the so-called legitimate, mainstream journalists," Maines writes, "maybe the question of ethical obligations should be raised about the way (mainstream journalists) present the news. After all, their reporting is supposed to be accurate and unbiased. If it were, then maybe it would be easier to tell the difference."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: GET BLAGOJEVICH OUT OF HERE?

The Associated Press reports that disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois may be among the stars of an NBC reality show called "I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!" The show is to be filmed in the jungle of Costa Rica, however, and Blagojevich cannot leave the country without a court's permission to do so, since he faces trial on corruption charges and is free on bail.

Given that Blagojevich is an accused criminal whose alleged crimes were committed while in public office, is it unacceptable for him to be featured in a network television show? Or, since he remains innocent until proven guilty, should he be allowed to make money in any legal fashion?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll with this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: GOTTA HAVE IT FRIDAY (OR SO I'D LIKE YOU TO THINK)

I'm driven by deadlines.

Meetings, articles, social obligations, family events ... Every week more than one deadline looms. Hitting various deadlines often requires me to intricately orchestrate tasks so that everything can get done on time.

Even so, it's rare that I miss a deadline. Partly this is out of a feeling of obligation to meet the commitments I've made, but there's also the sense that, if I miss one, the result will be akin to my experiences at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, where one late aircraft can trigger a chain of delays that snarls thousands of people who have nothing to do with that first plane.

That's why I hate it when colleagues, family or friends give me a false deadline. You know, one that has been set weeks before the actual deadline, because the deadline setter doesn't trust people to get things done when they say they will.

Last week a reader told me that his boss, the owner of the company, is notorious for missing deadlines on projects. As a result, my reader and his co-workers have taken it upon themselves to lie when the boss asks them about the deadline for any given project.

"Is it wrong for us to do this?" he asks.

Short answer: Yes, it's wrong. There's a basic ethical obligation to be truthful to your superiors, and nothing about this situation changes that.

We all have colleagues who simply cannot be counted upon to get things done on time. Even when they are gifted, talented people, they are officially among those who drive us nuts.

It's even more challenging when your boss is such a person. When the boss misses a deadline, the whole company misses it and the whole company pays the price. And, of course, there's nobody to call the boss on the carpet and demand that he or she get organized or else.

If you're looking for the ethical approach, however, lying to the boss is not the way to go.

It's ultimately the boss's job, not yours, to see that projects get done on time, even ones that he has entrusted to you. Your job is to make your best effort to accomplish this, and that doesn't mean lying to your boss. All you can ethically do is make clear the consequences of his failing to meet the deadlines: "This is when we need your signoff, and if we don't get it by then the project will inescapably be late."

Once you've done that -- and make sure that what you tell him is true -- you've done all you can do. If he still doesn't come through, devote your unscheduled down time to coming up with a diplomatic way to demonstrate, in the inevitable post-mortem, that the project's lateness was indeed due to his missing the deadline.

Hopefully being burned once or twice will convince him to get serious about time management. In any case, however, you'll know that you did your best and were honest and straightforward throughout.

Please, however, give colleagues who regularly make their deadlines a break by not misleading them into thinking that their work is due before it actually is. I'll appreciate it very much.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

FOLIO: Blog: Ads on Magazine Covers

See my blog post on Folio: magazine's blog about the recent spate of magazines blurring the line between editorial and advertising on their covers. You can read the post and makes comments by clicking here.

THE RIGHT THING: THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE ... AND NOTHING MORE?

A reader and her husband recently received a letter from the federal government that has put each of them in a slightly different ethical bind.

For several years my reader and her husband have been friends with a couple who live near them in Providence, R.I.

"The wife has always been a bit `crazy,"' my reader writes, "but in a fun, life-of-the-party kind of way."

Last year the wife volunteered for the Obama campaign. As she got more and more involved, she would travel to other cities and then to other states for extended stays. Gradually the volunteer wife's contact with local people, including her friends and even her husband, started to wane. After the election the volunteer wife still didn't return home. When my reader was able to reach her on the telephone, my reader reports, she found her evasive and "slightly manic."

Finally she returned home to collect her things and to move to Washington, hoping to get a full-time job with the new administration. She never contacted my reader while she was home to retrieve her stuff.

"Our friendship seemed pretty faded," my reader writes.

Three months into the new administration, though, the volunteer wife called my reader at work. She was in a hurry, she said, but she was applying for a job and asked my reader if she could serve as a "sort of reference" by confirming her address in Providence. My reader agreed. When she started to ask a few questions about the prospective job, however, the volunteer wife quickly excused herself and hung up.

She also tried to call my reader's husband, but wasn't able to reach him directly.

My reader and her husband received a letter shortly thereafter. They were indeed asked to confirm her address -- but were also asked if they had "any reason to question this person's honesty or trustworthiness" or if they had any "adverse information about this person's financial integrity."

Neither is crazy about the idea of vouching for anything about this woman other than her address, which is all that my reader had agreed to do.

"Are we ethically obligated to contact her and say that we aren't interested in serving as this type of reference and refuse to respond to the letters?" my reader asks. "I'm pretty sure that we shouldn't continue ignoring these letters and hoping they'll go away."

Yes, generally speaking, letters and obligations rarely disappear. And there is indeed an obligation in this case, no matter how shabbily the "friend" may have acted toward my reader.

Because she told her friend that she would confirm her address, my reader can't simply ignore the letter. The right thing for her to do is either to answer the letter -- she can, if she wishes, confirm the address but leave blank the rest of the letter, since it goes beyond her commitment to her friend -- or to contact her friend to let her know that she does not plan to do so because the letter isn't what she had been led to expect.

My reader's husband is in a different situation, of course. Since he never agreed to be a reference, he is free to ignore the letter, if he likes, or to fill it out any way he pleases. It was bad form for the volunteer wife not to get his agreement before having the letter sent to him, and the letter itself imposes no obligation on him.

Few people are comfortable turning down such requests from friends, no matter how distant they have become. If the volunteer wife had been more forthcoming about the type of reference she wanted, my reader might have felt more comfortable in telling her that she was not the best choice. If she now sends back the form only confirming her friend's address, it will likely speak volumes to those who asked for the reference -- but that's the volunteer wife's own fault for not being more forthcoming.

Everyone seeking a reference would be wise to choose their references carefully and not to mislead them about what they are being asked for. A bad or mixed reference is worse than no reference at all.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: Bonus Question

In an informal poll on my column's blog, 75 percent of respondents said that it is never OK for a CEO to receive a bonus in a year when the company hasn't met its predetermined expectations for earnings, profits and overall company performance. Of the remainder, 16 percent thought it was OK only if bonuses were a standard part of the compensation for the CEO's job, while 5 percent thought it was OK only if the shortfall was due to economic conditions beyond the CEO's control. Only 2 percent of readers thought it was always OK to pay a CEO a bonus even in years when expectations aren't met.

"It's part of a CEO's job to evaluate the risks of how the economy or other factors ... might affect operations," writes Phil Clutts of Harrisburg, N.C. "If the company has done poorly because of misfortune or planned losses, the top dog is not entitled to a bonus."

"In these times when companies are receiving huge amounts from the U.S. government, that money should be used in total to revive the company, not the executives or employees or shareholders," writes George Zahka of Bradenton Beach, Fla. "If the company's condition is due to malfeasance or dishonesty, then they should be prosecuted."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: WHOSE CHILD IS THIS?

The singer/actress Madonna is in the news again with another attempt to adopt a child from Malawi. In 2006 her adoption of a Malawian boy drew press scrutiny, and the public's ire, amid suggestions that the adoption process might have been unfairly expedited due to her celebrity status and to lavish gifts she had given to the country.

When I asked my readers about the propriety of that first adoption, some were outraged that the adoption process might have been speeded up because it was Madonna applying. Others believed that because the cause was virtuous -- "saving that child from poverty and disease," one reader wrote -- any criticism was unwarranted.

The press coverage this time around has been equally vigorous, and at this writing it seems that she will be unsuccessful in a second adoption.

So here's my question for you: Regardless of her celebrity status, in a matter such as this -- the adoption of a child -- should Madonna's privacy be respected? Or do the press and the public have a right to the inside scoop on her adoption?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll with this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: THE CHIME OF THE CENTURY

"Have you tackled wind chimes?" a reader from Watertown, Mass., asks me in an e-mail.

My reader's choice of a verb is no accident. Her neighbor's wind chimes are driving her nuts, and she's on the verge of violence against either the chimes or the neighbor.

"I know that, if this is my biggest problem, I should count myself lucky," she adds.

She recently moved into a new neighborhood, and the wind chimes hung at the house next door clank round the clock. She knows this, because she works from home and is therefore subjected to the noise day and night.

"I am trying to talk myself into liking wind chimes," she writes, "because I can't bear to approach my neighbor. I know some communities ban them."

She knows this because she has spent some time researching the issue on the Internet. She has sent me links to stories, including one from Denver about a lawsuit that forced a resident to take down his wind chimes by nightfall and not rehang them until 9 a.m. There are countless stories of homeowners waking to find their wind chimes duct-taped together to keep them from chiming.

"Am I in the right to not want my neighbor to subject everyone to wind chimes 24-7?" my reader asks. "It seems cowardly to go to the city to ask for a solution, rather than to approach my neighbor first."

My reader is wise to recognize that, if the wind-chime nuisance is the biggest problem she's faced since moving into a new home, she's fortunate.

Still, as anyone who has ever been kept awake by neighborhood noise knows, sleep deprivation can magnify the urgency of even the pettiest nuisance.

While she would be within her rights to call the city about the noise, it's good that my reader is reluctant to make that her first step. Calling the authorities on a new neighbor is not a good way to cultivate warm relations over the picket fence. It would be the best way to go if she had reason to fear that her neighbor might respond violently to her request, but since that is not the case -- there is no direct correlation between rage and wind chimes of which I'm aware -- contacting him directly is the civil and sensible thing to do.

As for the options, willing herself to like wind chimes seems futile, and is likely only to increase her frustration at the unwanted clanging. A judicious duct-tape strike by dark of night would be trespassing, and in any event wouldn't convey the message she wants to send. Her neighbor would be more likely to think it a children's prank than a request by a nearby adult for abatement of the noise.

The key point here is that the neighbor probably doesn't realize that the wind chimes are bothersome. He hung them, presumably, because he enjoys the sound. If my reader doesn't tell him that he's annoying her, he may never know. It's quite possible that, upon realizing that he's disturbing her, he'll voluntarily take them down altogether.

The right thing for my reader to do is to approach her new neighbor, introduce herself and ask him, as civilly as possible, if he would mind bringing in the wind chimes after dark. Granted, she may not get the results she wants, but she may also be surprised by how effective an honest and direct approach can be.

She might be doing the whole neighborhood a favor.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

Podcast of Weikel Lecture at University of Wisconsin (Madison) Business School

You can find a podcast of the Weikel Lecture at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) by clicking here.

THE RIGHT THING: `WE'LL CUT YOUR PAY TO SAVE HIS JOB'

During a minor economic downturn in the early 1990s, a former employer of mine was seeking ways to save money.

For years the company had staged lavish holiday parties around Christmas, often renting out a museum or a large catering hall for a sit-down dinner and party. Because money wasn't flowing as freely this year, however, he took a different approach.

Each department was allocated a modest budget to stage an event in its offices to which the rest of the company would be invited. One department hired a photographer to shoot group photos. Another hired a tarot-card reader. Employees brought food and drink to share with colleagues. Our department ordered pizzas and hired an accordion player from the North End of Boston who took requests.

I don't remember much about the more expensive offsite parties, but the self-made, in-house party sticks with me more than a decade later. I haven't forgotten the accordion player, who didn't know Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" (1971) and instead broke into the Gershwins' classic "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise" (1922).

In other words, sometimes saving money actually produces a better result -- a heartening thought at a time when the economic troubles of the early 1990s seem quaint compared with what we face now. A party of any sort feels extravagant when you're facing the prospect of job cuts.

In March the heads of 13 medical departments at a Boston-area hospital each contributed roughly $27,000 from their salaries so that the hospital could avoid layoffs. That was a voluntary decision. At other companies, however, employees are being asked to consider taking salary cuts to avoid having co-workers laid off.

When faced with such a question, is it wrong for an employee to respond that he or she would prefer not to take the cut? And does it matter how other employees decide?

Some management experts believe that it's foolhardy to ask employees to stick around at a diminished salary and expect them to be motivated to perform at their highest level. Better, they say, to lose a few employees while allowing those who remain to be fully compensated to do their jobs.

It seems to me that seeing your co-workers begin to drop like flies can be equally demoralizing. Besides, who wants to be the guy who argues against making any sacrifice at all to keep jobs? "I'd hate to see you go, Lenny, but if it's between you and 1 percent of my salary, see ya."

There is no ethical obligation, however, for any employee to offer to take a pay cut or, given the choice, to agree to one if she doesn't want to. The right thing for each employee to do is to weigh all the factors involved in the choice: If I agree to take a pay cut, will it be difficult to meet my family's financial obligations? If I don't agree and others are laid off, will my additional workload diminish the time I have to spend with my family? And so on.

Of course, even if an employee doesn't agree, he has no assurance that across-the-board pay cuts won't be made anyway, leaving him with only the option to quit or not to quit. And, of course, if he turns down the pay cut, it's possible that it will be his job that is cut to make ends meet. There are no good options in this situation, and thus no easy choices. There is no ethical obligation to accept a pay cut for the benefit of others, however, and someone who refuses to do so isn't falling short ethically, even if others decide to accept the cut.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: EIGHT IS MORE THAN ENOUGH

In an unscientific poll on my column's blog, 88 percent of my respondents thought that there was something wrong with Nadya Suleman, a Californian mother of six, being allowed to receive fertility treatments that resulted in her giving birth to octuplets.

It didn't matter to 55 percent of my respondents that Suleman was unmarried, but 85 percent said that it did matter if she was on public assistance. Only 15 percent believed that the whole issue should be a private decision between the mother and her doctor.

Californians seemed particularly outraged.

"There appears to be a profound lapse in judgment by everyone involved," writes Bill Wotring of Fullerton, Calif.

"Everything was wrong with her decision," writes Carole Heston of southern California.

"The doctor blew it," writes Carroll Straus of Orange County, Calif. "Big time."

"Basically it comes down to what is best for the child," writes Merrilee Gardner of Irvine, Calif. "There is nothing I see in this that was best for the children."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: START SPREADING THE NOT-QUITE-NEWS

Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," is quick to stress that his program, though styled after a television newscast, is actually "fake news" played for comedy.

Nonetheless, in a 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Stewart was named by 2 percent of respondents as the journalist they admired most. That doesn't sound like much, but no single journalist was named by more than 5 percent of the public, and at 2 percent Stewart was tied with Tom Brokaw, Anderson Cooper and Brian Williams.

Does the fact that he is regarded as a journalist by so many people impose any ethical obligations on Stewart -- say, to offer his send-up of the news in an accurate and well-researched manner?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll with this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: `WITHOUT YOU, WE WOULDN'T BE WHERE WE ARE TODAY'

Years ago I wrote an article for a business magazine about the CEO of a company that remanufactured engine parts for jets. He had received word that 11 airline jets, some of which contained parts supplied by his company, had been grounded. The groundings were due to engine problems, the causes of which were at that point unclear.

When he received word of the groundings, the CEO was about to sign his annual financial-audit papers. These papers, which the CEO must sign, include a statement that he does not know of any issues that would adversely affect the financial condition of the company.

Should he sign the audit papers or not? All he had, after all, was incomplete information on the jet groundings. What if it turned out that it wasn't his company's parts that had caused the problems, but he caused a panic among his lenders by raising the subject at all?

The first lawyers he consulted advised him to note the jet grounding in the statement. Dissatisfied with this response, however, he consulted another set of lawyers. This time he got the answer he wanted: Don't report the incident and go ahead and sign the papers.

While many readers disagreed with me, I thought then -- and think now -- that the CEO had made the wrong decision. If there was the remotest cause for concern about other jets which used his company's parts and were still in the air, I believed, he had an obligation to make passenger safety his highest priority, even if that meant raising an alarm by reporting the groundings.

His ability to find lawyers who would give him the advice he was looking for strikes me as particularly salient in light of the recent brouhaha over the $165 million in bonuses that have been paid to AIG executives, despite the fact that the company would have collapsed if it hadn't received almost $200 billion in federal bailout money.

The bonuses had to be paid to retain top employees who could turn around the company, one explanation ran, ignoring the fact that 52 of those employees, people whose bonuses had totaled more than $33 million, had already left the company.

Last fall, shortly after the initial bailout money -- a now-trivial $85 million -- had been doled out to AIG, it was reported that the company had spent $440,000 on a California spa retreat for its executives. Strong public outrage greeted the revelation. The sequel, the bonus blowup, has proven even more controversial, enough to draw personal criticism from the president of the United States.

It need hardly be said that to accept a hefty bonus when the company's performance has been so dismal as to place it on the verge of bankruptcy is unethical on the face of it. Virtually nobody at AIG had the kind of year that merits a bonus.

The unethical conduct does not necessarily stop there, however. Apparently the bonuses were a matter of contractual record, and anyone running a company in financial trouble -- and the federal government now owns 80 percent of AIG -- should make it his or her business to be aware of proposed outlays of this magnitude.

The bailout was intended to keep a major company afloat as it found a responsible way to right its business affairs. It wasn't meant to buy new country houses for its executives. Those in the federal government who didn't care, didn't know or made it their business not to know how AIG intended to spend the money fell short of their ethical obligations to AIG, to the Congress and to their ultimate bosses, the taxpayers.

Mind you, like the airplane-parts executive I wrote about, the bosses of AIG ought to have reported this potential problem rather than waiting for it to hit the newspapers and splatter even more egg on their faces. In the current climate, it didn't take a business wizard to tell that people weren't going to be very pleased with the idea of failed executives taking home huge bonuses.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: SLIPPING A DISK

In the world of movies, the big heist isn't always on the screen.

A few weeks ago a reader from southern California wrote to ask if she was doing anything wrong by accepting DVDs of current movies given to her by a friend, if she knew the DVDs to be illegal, bootlegged copies.

"I was happy to get the DVDs," she writes. "I watched and enjoyed the movies. And I thanked my friend who gave them to me."

The ethics of accepting bootlegged movies never crossed her mind until another of her friends told her that she "could not have even watched them, knowing that."

"Am I wrong to accept these DVDs, even from a second party?" she asks. "I do not want to get anyone in trouble. I am just wondering what your opinion is of my participation in it."

My opinion is that, legally, it stinks. Making, selling or buying bootleg movies is illegal everywhere in the United States.

I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say how much legal trouble my reader might be in, but I'd guess not very much, since she didn't pay for the movies and I doubt that watching them is illegal. At most, I suspect, she's guilty of failing to report a crime or something of that nature.

Some things are illegal but not unethical, however, the same way that many things are legal but not ethical. Setting aside the legalities, how does my reader's situation stack up?

My opinion: It still stinks. Ethically speaking, bootleg films -- and all other illegal replicas of copyrighted books, CDs, software and so forth -- are stolen goods, pure and simple. The person who made them was stealing from the rightful makers and distributors of the film, and anyone who knowingly watches them is aiding and abetting the crime.

From an ethical standpoint, it doesn't matter that my reader didn't pay for the movies she watched. Surely watching them made her less likely to pay to see them in a theater, and that's as good as taking money from everyone involved in the film.

Does it matter if she wouldn't have gone to the theater or paid for a legitimate DVD, whether or not she had seen the bootlegs? No. The viewing of a copyrighted film is not a human right, but rather a privilege with a cost associated with it. Because neither she nor anyone else involved in the bootleg paid anything to the rightful owners of the film, any viewing of it -- except by law-enforcement people trying to track down the bootlegger -- is unethical. Simple as that.

Granted, I have a vested interest in this issue: I make my living partly through royalties from my books and this syndicated column. Understandably I am loath to blithely accept that it is OK for people to make copies of my material without my permission.

Longtime readers of my column know that I always have taken a strong stance against illegal copies of copyrighted material, regardless of who's doing the copying or what their motives may be. Parents who make multiple copies of DVDs or videotapes to give to their children's friends set a terrible example. So too do professors who Xerox large portions of books or articles for their students' classroom use, without obtaining permission from the publisher or author.

People's work should not be stolen, whether by a bootlegger or by private citizens downloading or otherwise making illegal copies of DVDs, CDs or printed material for their own use. Those who own the rights to goods should decide who gets to use them and how. If it's wrong to steal a dress without paying, and thus depriving the dressmaker and the store owner of the fruits of their labor, then it's wrong to steal a movie and rob the filmmakers and distributors.

That one is a physical object and the other an intangible work of art is irrelevant. The movie is equally intangible in the theater, yet most people who buy bootlegs would probably feel it was wrong to sneak in the theater's back door and see the movie for free.

Are DVDs too high-priced? Does little of the purchase price actually go to the creators? No matter. This isn't a Robin Hood situation, and movies aren't essentials like food or shelter. If you don't like the business model, don't buy DVDs ... and don't watch them.

The right thing for my reader to do, should her friend offer her any more illegal DVDs, is to refuse to accept them and to tell her why: Doing so is both illegal and unethical, and she doesn't care to have any part in condoning such activity.

In the meantime, my reader should destroy any bogus DVDs, whether bootlegged or copied illegally, that she may have in her possession. If she wants to see a movie, she should go to the theater or, alternatively, wait until it's legally released on DVD and then either buy it, rent it or borrow it from her local library.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: DON'T BET THE HOUSE

In an unscientific poll on my column's blog, 92 percent of readers who responded said that people who contracted for mortgages which they couldn't afford, and should reasonably have known that they couldn't afford, should not be entitled to expect relief from the government when they're faced with foreclosure.

"The government should not bail out former homeowners in these instances," one reader writes. "My husband and I scrimped and saved and bought a little house. Where is our reward for not putting America into this crisis?"

But 63 percent of my respondents believe that people who signed for mortgages which they could afford, but then lost their jobs, are entitled to such government relief.

People who committed to a mortgage that they couldn't afford shouldn't be given relief, writes Debbie of Corona, Calif., but those who are facing foreclosure because of job loss or other life disaster "should be able to renegotiate their mortgages."

"I do not feel that the government should bail out homeowners who wanted to buy into the American Dream but couldn't afford it," says Deanne Dillenbeck of Cypress, Calif. "Nor do I feel that those who have lost their jobs should be bailed out ... The decline, and in some instances the lack of, ethics, morals and personal responsibility has in large part contributed to our current and dire circumstances."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: BONUS QUESTION

Here's a seemingly straightforward question for you. Assuming that it is legal and consistent with company policy for a CEO to be given a sizable bonus, is it right for the CEO to receive a bonus in a year when the company hasn't meet the predetermined expectations for earnings, profits and overall company performance? Does it matter that the shortfall may be due to overall economic conditions over which the CEO has no control? Does it matter if bonuses are typically part of the standard compensation for the job? Does it matter if executives in comparable positions at other companies are receiving comparable bonuses?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll with this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: A DRINKING PROBLEM

The other day Marty Haynes, a reader from Plancentia, Calif., was enjoying a hamburger with his wife, Julie, at a Carl's Jr. restaurant in Yorba Linda.

"Due to the current economic situation," Haynes writes, "I succumbed to my wife's insistence that it was OK to share a small fountain drink from the self-serve fountain."

What made Haynes uncomfortable was that the restaurant offers free refills on drinks, meaning that, when he and his wife finished their small-sized beverage, they could refill the cup and continue sharing.

"There is no sign saying `One per customer, please' or `Only one refill, please' or anything like that," he writes. "I think it is assumed that each consumer should purchase their own drink."

Later that day, Haynes mentioned his concern to his son and to his daughter-in-law. They told him that they frequently shared a drink in similar situations and saw nothing wrong with it.

But Haynes sees a slippery slope here, since he doubts that anyone would agree that it would be OK for, say, a family of eight to share one small soda with many free refills.

"So what do you think?" he asks. "Is it OK for a couple to share a small drink and take advantage of the free-refills policy?"

My initial impulse was to consult the person with whom I would be most likely to find myself in a similar situation.

"I don't think there's anything wrong with it," my wife said, "as long as you buy the drink and are willing to drink it out of the same cup."

She reminded me that she rarely finishes her beverage when we go to a shop with a self-service fountain. Since she typically gives the drink to me to finish, we often buy only one drink instead of two.

"How is this any different?" she asks.

But nonetheless something about the practice still felt a bit hinky to me. Surely the restaurant didn't intend its policy to allow for multiple drinkers from the same refillable cup, I thought. The right or wrong of the situation had to be based, in part at least, on the intent of the offer.

Instead of trying to guess, I checked the Carl's Jr. Web site. No guidance there, though there were some coupons for a free drink if I wanted to buy the new Crisp Burrito. I didn't, so instead I called the company's toll-free customer-service hot line. There a customer-service representative looked up the refill policy for me.

"You have to purchase a drink to get a refill," she told me.

She kept looking through the guidelines.

"There is nothing in our policy about limiting how many people can drink from that same refillable cup," she said.

"So it would be OK for me to buy a drink, share it with my wife and then refill it?" I asked.

"Unless a local franchisee sets its own rules not allowing that," she said, "there is no written company policy against that."

From a strictly ethical point of view this practice passes muster only if you ask first. Rather than trying to guess the intentions of others, the right thing is simply to ask them. As for the restaurants, if they want to place limits on their refill policies, the right thing for them to do is to let customers know as clearly as possible.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: VOTE FOR THE NAME YOU (SORT OF) KNOW

Several months ago I received an e-mail from an acquaintance who is the head of a certain organization. She wanted me to vote for a young entrepreneur, an alumnus of her institution, who had been nominated as a leading young entrepreneur.

"Please log onto the link below and vote for him as this year's best young entrepreneur," she wrote in a mass e-mail to seemingly everyone she knew.

She was pulling for the young man to win the contest, regardless of her e-mail recipients' perception of the other candidates, and it was clear that his winning would yield significant bragging rights for her organization.

I was reminded of her e-mail when a reader from Tustin, Calif., wrote to tell me of an e-mail he had received from a friend of a distant friend. This friend-of-a-friend wanted him to vote for a video created by his son's first-grade class, which had been entered in a contest to win $25,000 in technology equipment for their classroom. The class was one of five finalists in the competition.

"I would like to ask that you take time to sign up and vote for their video," the friend-of-a-friend wrote.

At first my reader thought that this was a good way for the boy's class to benefit from new technology. Thinking it over, however, and realizing that he hadn't seen the other four videos, he wondered how he could cast a vote saying that theirs was the best.

Examining the e-mail more closely, my reader found an attachment: a note from the class teacher explaining how to view all five videos on a Web site and then vote for his class's video. So my reader could in fact view each video and then vote based on their merits.

"But clearly that is not the intent of the parent who sent me the e-mail or of the teacher," he writes. "What kind of lesson does this send to those 6-year-olds? If they win because the voting has been padded, and not on merit, then they will have won fraudulently. How should the other classes feel if they lose because `well-meaning' parents sought to manipulate the vote?"

Many years ago, when I was in graduate school and an election for house council was being held, a classmate of mine -- now a minister -- explained it to me this way: "You vote for your friends."

That point is more reasonable than it may seem at first glance. We know our friends, after all, and have a clearer window into their values and integrity than we do with strangers. It's therefore possible to support them with greater conviction than it is with someone we don't know. But of course our knowledge of that person might also provide incentive not to vote for them, if we think that they aren't up to the job or don't deserve it.

Supporting a child's class is a noble goal, but the right thing to do in any election is to understand your choices and vote only for the person or idea that truly most deserves your support. That's true whether you're voting for a bunch of 6-year-olds or for the prospective leader of your country.

If my reader deemed two of the class videos to be of equal merit, there would be nothing wrong with him using the personal connection, admittedly a tenuous one in this case, as a tiebreaker. But it would be irresponsible to vote for one video without having seen them all. And if one of the other four videos truly outshines the others, the only honest choices are to vote for that one or not to vote at all.

As for the "young entrepreneur of the year" contest, I did not vote for any candidate, since I didn't know them well enough to judge. The candidate my acquaintance was promoting nonetheless was one of the winners.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS TAKE THEIR JOBS

"Friends don't let friends drive drunk," writes a reader who continues, "Friends don't steer a conversation about a friend's references to their own qualifications for the job."

My reader agreed with 71 percent of respondents who responded "no" to an unscientific poll on my blog that asked if it is OK to talk about your own qualifications if a friend's prospective employer pursues this line of conversation.

"Don't say this `friend' didn't steer the conversation," another reader writes. "The qualifications being discussed were clearly those of the job applicant. Just how did this supposed `friend' insert his or her qualifications into the conversation?"

However, 29 percent of readers responding thought it perfectly fine to answer such questions.

"Isn't it possible that the prospective employer wants to know if you are qualified enough to judge your friend's qualifications?" one of them asks. "If you get asked about applying for the job, you can simply say, `No, thank you."'

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: IF THE SHOE FITS ...

A reader from Miami took a part-time job selling women's shoes in a department store. After being on the job for five weeks, he sold a pair of shoes to a woman who, after the sale, saw that a friend of hers was also working in the shoe department that day.

"According to the rules of working on commission," my reader writes, "once a customer is yours, he or she stays yours from start to finish. It is the salesperson's responsibility to ask the customer whether or not he or she has already been helped. I always ask, because I want to avoid any confrontations with my co-workers."

Once the customer saw her friend, however, it was the friend whom she had help her find two more pairs of shoes.

"I rang her up for the one pair I got for her," my reader writes. "And then her friend rang her up for the other two.

"There is a way for one employee to ring up another employee's customer," he adds, "and still give the commission to the employee who brought them the shoes, but it is up to the ringing employee to do the right thing and honor the commission."

Would the other salesperson credit him for the sale of the other two pairs of shoes? My reader wasn't sure, so right after ringing up the customer he printed out his own sales statistics. When the customer left 10 minutes later, after being helped by her friend, he printed out his sales statistics again.

He wondered whether he'd see the extra two pairs credited to him, but was surprised to see that not even the one pair he had personally sold was still listed.

"My sales number had decreased by the exact commission on the price of the shoes I had sold that woman," he writes. "Not only did (the saleswoman) steal my customer, but she had her friend return the shoes I sold her, only to resell them along with the other two pairs she bought."

My reader did not confront his co-worker -- "It wasn't worth the $3.97 I lost to her," he writes -- but he can't help feeling that he was wronged both by the sale of the additional two pairs of shoes to his established customer and especially by the return and resale of the pair that she had bought from him.

Can't a friend sell another friend a pair of shoes?

Of course she can. Had the customer sought out her friend to begin with, there would have been nothing wrong with tossing the commissions her way.

Once the customer had made the initial purchase from my reader, however, his co-worker was obligated to honor the fact that the customer was his. If she convinced her friend to return the shoes she had already bought and buy them again, it not only did her colleague an even greater disservice but also was a de-facto acknowledgment that she knew the customer to be his and took the commissions regardless.

It's quite possible that the co-worker knew her friend's taste in shoes better than my reader did, but that doesn't outweigh the store's established practice. The right thing for her to do was to help her friend, if she wanted to, but to credit any sales to her colleague.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: OCTO-MOM

Many readers have e-mailed to ask whether I thought it ethical for Nadya Suleman, a California mother of six, to receive fertility treatments that resulted in her giving birth to octuplets.

Given the wide variety of opinions coming in, I put the questions to my readers: Was there anything wrong with Suleman's decision to have the procedure? Was it wrong for her doctor to implant six eggs, two of which later split, in one woman, or should this be a private decision between a mother and her doctor? Does it matter to your response that the mother is unmarried? Does it make a difference if the children may depend at least in part on public assistance?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the four polls with these questions that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: HAS THIS PARENT CROSSED THE LINE?

Walking in a store shortly after Christmas, a frequent reader of this column saw a parent "tap" an apparently misbehaving young girl who looked to be about 7 years old.

"I almost followed them to their car to get their license plate and report them," he writes, but decided not to because he didn't want to neglect his own children.

So what is a "tap?"

"It was more than a pat, but less than a hit," my reader says.

He goes on to say that he considers a pat to be a gentle touch, while a tap has the kind of force you might use in swatting a fly, enough to make an audible noise if applied to a piece of wood.

"I wanted to do something," he writes. "But what was the right thing, not knowing what happened before the incident?"

It's a normal impulse to want to ensure the safety of children. It's also common, however, for even a good parent occasionally to lose composure when dealing with a child in a public place.

I make the latter observation not in an effort to condone striking a child, but merely to acknowledge that not everyone who does so is a confirmed child-batterer. Even the most well-intentioned parent can't always control his or her own behavior in trying to control a child -- which my reader knows perfectly well.

"I am not perfect myself," he admits. "I've had my own share of problems to deal with."

If it is absolutely clear that a child is being abused and physically beaten, no one should hesitate to intervene -- or to ask store security to do so -- or, later on, to report the incident. But this episode didn't involve that level of abuse.

In the past, my reader says, when he has witnessed parents who he believes have "crossed the line" by striking or yelling at a child, he has intervened, but gently: He asked the parents, "Is there a problem I can help you with?" or "Do you need help?"

By engaging these parents by offering help, I believe my reader did the right thing. Such an approach is less antagonistic than "He is only a child!" or "Stop beating your kid, you wacko!" The confrontational approach, by placing the parent in question on the defensive, has a good chance of escalating an incident.

In situations such as the one my reader raises, in which you really don't know the specifics of the situation, the ethical response is to engage the parent and let him or her know that others are witnessing what's going on, even if you don't say so directly. The shock of having another adult express concern might force the parent to recognize that "tapping" might not be the best solution to a child's unruliness. Hearing another member of the community offer help or express concern gives the parent a moment to step back and reassess how he or she is behaving.

In this case, my reader's response was proper, proportionate and, yes, ethical. The key phrase in his report of the incident is "less than a hit." If he saw a parent hit a child -- or, indeed, saw any adult hit any child -- he would have a clear ethical responsibility to intervene. Because this case did not rise to that level, his obligation did not rise to the point of intervention.

His concern is understandable, but it is not my reader's responsibility to chase every parent who taps a child out to the parking lot. We should always err on the side of caution when it comes to protecting children, but it's also important to use common sense.

Some parents simply need to reassess how best to discipline their occasionally unruly children and, while my reader may be right in thinking that this parent's approach was inappropriate, it did not reach a level requiring him to take further action.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: THE COACH GOT SACKED

Jeff Jagodzinski, the former football coach for Boston College, was fired after he interviewed for a job as head coach of the New York Jets, a higher-paying job in professional football. He had been warned by the college's athletic director that he would be fired if he interviewed for the Jets job, which he didn't get.

I asked readers if they thought that it was right to fire someone for interviewing for another job. Of the readers who responded to an unscientific poll on my column's blog, 22 percent thought that such firings were OK.

"If my employer warned me, and then I interviewed anyway," Clayton Eads opines, "I'd deserve a firing."

But another reader writes: "This is America, and since when is it not legal to better oneself, as long as it is done on your time, not company time?"

Patrick Harvey of Mission Viejo, Calif., acknowledges that, though the practice of tearing up contracts is often tolerated, Boston College had the right to enforce its contract.

"The downside," he writes, "is that it may make it difficult for the college to recruit future coaches if they know that they will be unable to break a contract and move up."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: THE ETHICS OF SHOPPING

My 7-year-old grandson, Lucas, doesn't watch much television. He is, however, a connoisseur of infomercials.

For several months Lucas went on about the Iron Gym pull-up bar.

"It slides right over any door frame, Nana," he would tell my wife. "Have you seen it, Nana? It's really cool. If you act now, instead of two payments of $29.99, it's only $29.99 total."

My wife, of course, had no idea what an Iron Gym was. We decided to get Luke one for Christmas, though, and looked up the ad online. Before we purchased it, however, we shopped around a bit and saw that our local bed-and-bath store had the same product on sale for only $23.99.

We had done all of our research online and Luke had seen the product on television, but -- strange as it may seem -- the lowest price we could find was in fact at the "bricks and mortar" alternative, the bed-and-bath store, though it had done nothing to make us aware of that fact or to woo us as shoppers.

I was reminded of our Iron Gym experience when I received an e-mail from Jeff Eales, a reader in Mission Viejo, Calif.

He wanted to buy a certain item for his son, so he went to a store that he knew to have good prices and online specials. Unfortunately that item was out of stock, so Eales drove to a second store that had the product in stock. His son tried it on and decided that this was indeed what he wanted, but the price was quite a bit higher than the first store typically charged. No sale.

After returning home, however, Eales decided to look on the first store's Web site. He ordered the product online and had it delivered to the first store, where he picked it up about a week later. He ended up spending about 15 percent less than he would have paid at the second store, where his son actually tried on the product.

His son didn't believe that they were cheating the second store by going there and "touching, feeling and trying on the product" before buying it elsewhere, my reader writes. Eales, on the other hand, had some misgivings, since the second store has rent, employees and other costs incurred in displaying its wares.

"But since the price was about 15 percent more there," he says, "we knew we wouldn't buy it there. In a sense we were `using' the store."

Since they knew they were ultimately going to buy the product at the first store, Eales asks, was he ethically wrong in his visit to the second store?

Retailers may cringe at my answer, but no -- Eales not only acted ethically, but also acted sensibly. As a frequent patron of the second store, where he has spent thousands of dollars through the years, he might have told its manager that he had seen the same product offered for 15 percent less elsewhere and given him the opportunity to match that price. He was under no ethical obligation to do so, however.

Shopping for the best price is smart and ethical. Eales did the right thing by finding a place where he could let his son try on the product, to make sure that it was indeed something he wanted, and then to go buy the product where he could get the best price.

When Lucas opened his present at Christmas and saw the Iron Gym, he was downright gleeful. He and his father went off to assemble it, but he quickly returned to the room with a question for my wife.

"You didn't pay $60 for this," he asked, "did you?"

He may be only 7, but Luke is a strong shopper.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: HOUSE BAIL-OUT

Are people who contracted for mortgages which they couldn't afford, and should reasonably have known that they couldn't afford, entitled to expect relief from the government when they're faced with foreclosure? Are people who signed for mortgages which they could afford, but then lost their jobs, entitled to such relief?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the two polls with these questions that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: TWO RINGS AND `DR. PHIL'

Elinor Kohler, a reader from Columbus, Ohio, was perturbed by a recent episode of the television program "Dr. Phil." The segment in question asked, "Would you return a diamond ring if a jeweler gave you the wrong one by mistake?"

The gist of the issue was that Eddie had proposed to Ashley and given her a lovely diamond ring, one that apparently they had picked out together. Crying, celebration and ring attachment ensued. The next day, however, Eddie received a call from the jeweler telling him that he had been given the wrong ring. The one he got was worth about $639 more than the one they actually had picked out.

The jeweler asked Eddie to return the ring. Eddie didn't want to, because by now he and Ashley were so sentimentally attached to this particular ring that he couldn't simply swap it for another one.

The jeweler asked Eddie to pay the difference in price. Eddie didn't want to, because the mistake had been the jeweler's, not his.

The jeweler took the issue to court, but Eddie didn't show up for the court date.

And they all ended up talking to Dr. Phil McGraw.

What irked my reader, though, was not the actions of either side in the dispute, but rather the solution that McGraw came up with.

"My first thought was that of course he should give back the ring or pay the difference," Kohler writes. "Dr. Phil thought otherwise."

He started by reminding the jeweler that it would cost more than $639 to sue the couple for the ring. So far, so good. The jeweler offered to settle for $500.

The couple still balked, so McGraw asked the jeweler if he would split the difference and take $320. He said yes, and the couple agreed.

Then -- and here's the kicker that really tossed my reader for a loop -- McGraw told the couple that he would pay the $320, and even treat them to a really nice dinner to celebrate getting the matter resolved.

"That just didn't seem right to me," Kohler writes. "What do you think?"

No matter how many jewelers have schooled me, I'm not sure I could tell the difference between similarly sized diamonds if they were in the same setting. But whether or not Eddie and Ashley made an honest mistake is not my reader's question.

Was the host wrong to negotiate a lower price, pay off the difference and then reward the couple with a nice meal?

Because the couple and the jeweler came to the show to seek McGraw's assistance in finding a solution, he did the right thing in trying to get the parties to reach a compromise.

And, while it may seem that his decision to pay the difference himself and send them out to dinner gave the couple everything they wanted and the jeweler only half, there was nothing untoward about that decision, so long as the outcome was not prearranged between McGraw and the couple.

It isn't relevant to the current discussion whether the court would have found for the couple or for the jeweler. The jeweler, in reaching a compromise, willingly waived whatever his legal rights might be, and he's perfectly free to do so. This isn't a case of McGraw imposing a verdict on the jeweler, willy nilly, but rather a case of his convincing both sides to give up part of what they hoped to get.

I understand Kohler's displeasure at McGraw's picking up the price of the ring. If the host, a wealthy man to whom the money isn't consequential, was going to open his own wallet, why not give the jeweler $639 at the beginning and save everyone the trouble?

But there's no reason -- again, assuming that things weren't arranged beforehand -- for McGraw not to be generous in this instance. And by waiting until after the compromise had been struck, he allowed the process of compromise to work its way to fruition, which may well have offered valuable lessons to both parties and to the viewing audience, and certainly made for more compelling television.

It may sit uneasy with those of us who pay full freight for the things we buy. But when someone wants to help someone else out of a financial pickle because they feel their pain, good on them. Next time I'm given merchandise that's more expensive than whatever I actually purchased, I'm still likely to return it rather than call Dr. Phil to help me out. But if you want to ring him up, go right ahead.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: CAFFEINATED VOTERS

Most readers would not tell their local Starbucks clerk that they had voted, if they hadn't, simply to get a free cup of coffee. Still, 15 percent of the readers responding to an unscientific poll on my column's blog said that they would take the free cup of joe if they planned to vote later in the day.

"I was faced with specifically this quandary on Election Day," writes William Jacobson of Cypress, Calif. "While I did consider jumping for the free cup of coffee pre-voting, I did relent and do the ethical thing by holding off. I had my fiancee's free cup instead."

"I would turn down the offer," writes Phil Clutts of Harrisburg, N.C,, "and say that it's my responsibility (and everybody else's) to vote, so thanks anyway, but I'll pass up your offer."

"Anything to encourage people to get out and vote is a good thing," writes Megan Chromik of Cambridge, Mass.

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: `LET'S TALK ABOUT YOU'

You're a reference for a friend who is applying for a job. He's a serious enough candidate that you get a call from the prospective employer. In the course of the conversation, however, the discussion turns from your friend's qualifications for the job to your own.

Is it OK to pursue this line of conversation, even if you suspect that you might be offered the job rather than your friend?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll about this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: SOME OLD TRUTHS ABOUT VALUES, MORALS AND ETHICS

Last week, on the first night of a class in professional ethics that I team-teach at Emerson College in Boston, I wrote these words on the board: "hard work," "honesty," "courage," "fair play," "tolerance," "curiosity," "loyalty" and "patriotism."

Then I turned and asked the class: "What are these things?"

"Values," a few of the students responded.

"Where have you heard them before?"

"In Barack Obama's inaugural address this afternoon," one of the students piped up.

He was right, of course. These are the values President Obama listed in his speech, the ideals upon which he thinks our success in meeting new challenges is based.

"These things are old," he said. "These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history."

Typically I start any ethics class by telling the students that I cannot teach them values, nor can I hope to change their values. The values they have coming into the class are likely to be the same ones they have leaving it.

Our values are shaped early in life, I tell them, by our earliest experiences and, above all, by the examples -- positive and negative -- supplied by our families.

The priorities we place on these values may change, though, depending on where we are in life. If we're in our early 20s and single, for example, we may prioritize our value of fairness and tell off an unreasonable boss. In our 40s, when we have a family to support, that urge for fairness may be trumped by our concern for our family's well-being, leading us to forgo the urge to put a workplace ogre in his place.

Our values don't change, in short. Our priorities do, though, and we act accordingly.

These personal values that help us determine right and wrong are the morals that guide us. How we apply these morals to particular situations ... well, that's ethics.

People with wildly different political views may share similar values, as then-Sen. Barack Obama (D.-Ill.) and Sen John McCain (R.-Ariz.) demonstrated in the recent presidential campaign.

The two men clearly had fundamental differences of opinion on many of the issues, but at different points in the campaign each showed a similar sense of fair play -- McCain when he castigated a conservative talk-radio host for raising insinuations about Obama's religion and Obama when he rejected his supporters' attempts to capitalize on the pregnancy of the unmarried, teenage daughter of McCain's running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin (R.-Alaska).

The difference between the two men, in short, is not one of values but rather of how they choose to apply these values to various situations. That's what defines them as politicians, but it's their values that define them as human beings.

When Obama said, in his inaugural address, that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, "so defining of our character, (as) giving our all to a difficult situation," that's what he was talking about: how we choose to apply our values to a task. He was talking about ethics, about doing the right thing when faced with "common dangers."

Each time I face a new class of students, deliver a talk or sit down to write a column on ethics, I do so fully aware that I cannot change my audience's values. It's a daunting task to stand before a group of people, some of whom I know will choose to behave unethically regardless of what I say or write, and make an attempt to influence their ethics or at least to inspire them to think those ethics through.

The right thing for me to do, based on my values, is to give my all to such difficult tasks. And the right thing for you to do, whether you are a student, a listener or a reader, is to decide whether the way you choose to behave reflects the values you say you hold dear. If not, you either don't have the values you think you do or you need to rethink your behavior. There is nothing new about this observation. But it is true.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

Lies vs. Metaphors

Here's a short clip from The Colbert Report where presidential inaugural poet, Elizabeth Alexander, tries to explain the difference between a metaphor and a lie to Stephen Colbert.

[Sent to me by friend and colleague Leslie Brokaw.]

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Elizabeth Alexander

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THE RIGHT THING: THE COST OF DOING GOOD

More often than not, doing the right thing results in a good outcome. In the workplace that makes sense, since good ethical behavior often parallels good management decisions: Treat your employees with respect, for example, and they're likely to be more productive and more inclined to work for the greater good of the company.

Let's face it, though: There are times when doing the right thing can cause pain. Sure, the action may have a payoff in the long term, but that doesn't diminish the pain in the short term.

A reader who is a licensed therapist learned this firsthand after leaving her most recent job as a supervisor for a mental-health agency.

One of the therapists whom she had been assigned to supervise had memory problems which led her to make significant billing errors. When my reader brought the problem to the attention of the agency's administration, the memory-impaired therapist was transferred to another supervisor. No action was taken to correct the billing.

Soon afterward my reader was assigned to coordinate one of her agency's specialty programs. The therapist she had reported previously was seeing clients through this program. Again my reader brought this therapist's billing errors to the attention of the administration, and again nothing was done to address the issue or to correct the resulting errors.

"When I left the agency for another position," my reader writes, "I felt I had done all I could to solve this problem and could not do anything further."

For her new position, however, she attended a compliance-training program and learned that the type of errors her former supervisee repeatedly made were considered fraud. If a licensed therapist has knowledge of fraud and doesn't report it, the trainer told the group, her license is at risk.

So my reader called the county fraud hot line and reported the errors. As a result of her call, her previous employer's billing was audited and her complaint was substantiated.

The call itself was confidential, but the fact that the audit team looked specifically at one particular therapist's work led the agency staff to conclude that it was my reader who had made the fraud complaint. Since the audit, none of her former colleagues will talk to her or respond to written communication.

"The difficult part of this is that I have lost all of my friendships at the agency," she writes. "I have accepted that the relationships are over, but I still wonder if I did the right thing."

I'm rarely one to quote scripture, but there's a terrific passage in the Book of Isaiah that captures the essence of this experience: "So justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance. Truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey."

Because my reader stood up when those around her refused to acknowledge a serious ethical lapse -- and, as it turned out, serious illegality -- she has been left open to the judgments of her former co-workers, even though the audit confirmed what she had been saying all along.

She was correct to report the billing errors, first to her administrators and then to the hot line when it was clear that otherwise no action would be taken to correct the issue. In the long run her profession benefits from her willingness to report the issue, not solely because of any legalities, but also because it was the right thing to do.

As for her former colleagues, they did and are doing the wrong thing. That my reader was forced to go to an outside authority is their own fault, and they should not blame her personally for taking an action which, if left undone, might have placed her own career in jeopardy.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: MY OPEN FACEBOOK

My readers were split on how far an employer should go in using Facebook pages, Myspace pages or blog posts to determine whether or not to hire an otherwise qualified candidate with a solid work history and strong recommendations. In an informal poll on my column's blog, 52 percent of my readers said that employers should be able to use these pages and posts in evaluating a job candidate.

"Anyone who thinks that they can have an anonymous online life while living a public life needs to get real," writes Andrea Useem of Virginia.

But another reader wonders "(where we) draw the line with our personal life becoming professional business and vice versa." This reader is very careful to keep professional information out of her profiles, partly to keep employers from "nosing around my dating profiles."

Thomas Ward of Wisconsin thinks that anything aired publicly, whether actually or virtually, is fair game.

"When we publish information about ourselves and put it on the Web for anyone to consume," Ward says, "we open a door that has consequences. As a professional recruiter, I use every tool I have to read a candidate. Web search is a common tool."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

Steve Jobs Health Disclosures

Discussion about Steve Jobs and disclosures about his health on WGBH's Greater Boston.

[Read earlier discussion of Steve Jobs on the blog by clicking here.]

SOUND OFF: MOVING UP OR MOVING OUT

Jeff Jagodzinski, the football coach for Boston College, recently interviewed for a job as coach of the New York Jets, a higher-paying job in professional football. He had been warned by the college's athletic director, Gene DeFilippo, that he would be fired if he interviewed for the Jets job, but did so anyway and was fired shortly thereafter. He apparently will not get the job with the Jets.

Jagodzinski was under contract to Boston College, but it is not unusual for college coaches under contract to leave for NFL jobs. Do you think it's right to fire someone, with or without a warning, for interviewing for another job? Or is an employee entitled to seek to better him/herself?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll about this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: WHEN THE END IS NEAR FOR A PET

When I was a freshman in college, my mother called to tell me that she and my father had decided to euthanize our family dog, a beagle-terrier mix that my father had bought for the family at an animal shelter when my sister and I were very young.

P.J. -- named for my sister, Patti, and myself -- had been sick since before I went off to school, suffering from a tumor that the veterinarian believed to be inoperable.

It was a difficult telephone call, but I remember feeling odd that I wasn't as upset as I thought I should have been. Partly I was preoccupied with settling into my first semester of school, but also for several months I had understood that our dog would likely not make it through the end of the fall semester.

The memory wafted up after a reader from Waunakee, Wisc., wrote with a question about her pets.

"We love our dog and cats," she writes, "and they have been a source of great comfort and love for us. But now they are getting old. At what point do we let them die in peace or put them to sleep?"

My reader knows that her veterinarian can sell her many medical supplies that will help keep the animals alive for a few more years. She points out, however, that these items cost a great deal of money.

"Just a few years ago," she continues, "there was no treatment for these illnesses, and we would have kept them comfortable until we had to euthanize them."

Advancements in veterinary science have made it possible to prolong a pet's life longer than before, but she's not sure that it's the right thing to do.

"How do we make these decisions now?" she asks. "How do we take care of our pets, whom we dearly love, without wiping out all of our savings? Where do we draw the line without betraying our pets?"

Hers is a question that will likely be faced eventually by all pet owners except the very elderly and those who live with long-lived parrots or tortoises. It's a highly personal decision, but one that requires some pointed questions.

To start with, how will keeping a pet alive affect its quality of life? Simply because there are surgeries that can be performed, or medicines that can be administered, doesn't guarantee that a pet won't continue to suffer from an underlying disease or from the decline brought on by the aging process.

My reader also needs to consider how taking extraordinary measures will affect her own quality of life, however. Will the expense of medicine or surgery for her pets leave her unable to pay her day-to-day bills? Will it force her to forgo putting aside money for a child's education or the purchase of a home?

The questions about costs should, of course, be asked by anyone with a pet, regardless of its health. If you can't afford to own a particular pet without jeopardizing your own standard of living, then -- for the sake of the pet and for your own sake -- it's best to find a home for the pet with a family that can better afford it.

The right thing for any pet owner to do, when the pet nears its end, is to discuss these issues with a veterinarian who can lay out the options. As long as it is made thoughtfully and not capriciously, the decision to conclude a pet's life is not a matter of betrayal but rather of deciding how best to let a beloved member of the household live out the end of its life.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: A PASSING AGGRAVATION

Not long ago, while driving on a long, flat stretch of freeway in central Wyoming, a reader from Salt Lake City faced a dilemma.

My reader, P.W., tries not to exceed posted speed limits, he says, for "ethical and safety considerations." Typically he stays in the right lane and watches as other drivers barrel by on the left.

That's what he did for most of the drive on the Wyoming freeway, which was divided, with two lanes running in each direction. The posted speed limit was 75 miles per hour, and even at that rate people were whizzing past P.W.

But then P.W. came to a stretch of at least 10 miles where road work was underway. The freeway narrowed to only one lane in each direction, and the posted speed limit was reduced to 50 miles per hour.

After a short period of driving at 50 miles per hour, P.W. noticed that, while there were no cars in front of him, a long line of cars was strung out behind him.

"It was clear," he writes, "that, by following what I thought was right, I was inconveniencing many other people."

So P.W. accelerated, violating his ethical beliefs and risking a speeding ticket -- in a construction area, no less, where fines are doubled.

"I let public pressure force me to go against my values," P.W. writes. "I'm sure it was the practical thing to do, but I'd like to have your take on the ethical viewpoint."

Public pressure can work in unusual ways. Once, while I was driving in Georgetown, a suburb of Washington, I made a right-hand turn when the traffic light was yellow. Awaiting me was a police officer who had already pulled over three or four drivers at the same intersection.

As she took out her ticket book, one of the other drivers shouted out his window, "Give him a ticket! Give him a ticket!"

Presumably he wanted me to have a ticket to match the one he already had received. He didn't get what he wanted, though: The officer looked over at the yelling man, looked down at her citation book and then stepped back. With an exaggerated, sweeping motion of her arms she directed me to drive on.

Public pressure, in the form of the other driver's shouting, apparently changed her mind about giving me a ticket.

In P.W.'s case, he knew that he was wrong to break the speed limit while driving through the construction zone on that Wyoming freeway. But the drivers lining up behind him made him feel that he was inconveniencing them and/or annoying them by keeping them from driving as quickly as they would ordinarily have been doing ... regardless of the posted limits.

Often we're faced with situations in which we choose to do or not do something -- to turn a blind eye to inappropriate behavior at work or not to turn in a classmate for cheating, for example, or to speed because everyone else is speeding -- because we don't want others to think ill of us. So we do the wrong thing in order to fit in.

No lives were at risk when P.W. observed the speed limit, only the patience of the drivers behind him. It would have made for an awkward 12 minutes or so of driving, but the right thing for him to do was to follow his values and observe the speed limit, regardless of how many cars accumulated behind him. As soon as it was possible, of course, he should have pulled over and let the speeders pass.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: FIRE THE LIAR

One of the most responded-to of the informal polls on my column's blog also resulted in one of the most lopsided tallies: Of the readers who responded, a hefty 95 percent believed that an executive who is discovered to have listed false academic credentials on his or her resume should be fired.

"Why would a company want dishonest people working for them?" one reader asks. If an executive lies on a resume, he adds, "why would you trust this same person with confidential company information?"

Marguerite Rathbone of California absolutely agrees.

"An executive should be fired, not allowed just to resign, if they gave any false information on a resume," Rathbone says. "If they lied on something so easily verified, what else would they lie about?"

Bill Chase of Mission Viejo, Calif., would terminate any employee after verifying that false claims had been made on his or her resume. He'd go further, though, and, if called for a reference, would tell prospective future employers of the reason for termination.

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: THE COFFEE VOTE

On Election Day a national coffee-shop chain in the United States offered a free cup of coffee to anyone who told the clerk that he or she had voted. Would you consider telling the clerk that you already voted, in order to get the free coffee, even if you hadn't, if you knew that you were going to vote later in the day?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll about this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: WHAT WAS I THINKING?

As always at the turn of the year, it's time to reassess the past 12 months -- which, for me, means to reconsider a handful of columns that made some readers wonder, "What were you thinking?"

Four columns in particular drew responses that prompted me to revisit some of the issues therein.

COUPON RETURNS.

Back in March I advised Jennifer Schwanke of Columbus, Ohio, that she had done the right thing by deciding not to use the coupons that were given her for purchasing a freezer, after she had decided to return the freezer. The coupons provided discounts at various area food stores.

Laurie Marshall, owner of Kelly's Coffee and Fudge Factory in Anaheim, Calif., and Rachael Ritchie, owner of GoodFella's Pizza in Athens, Ohio, both took me to task for missing the retailer's point of view. Coupons are meant to draw business, they pointed out, and the stores that issued the coupons don't care whether or not she kept the freezer.

"I am struggling to get people in my door," Marshall wrote. "Using the coupon would get her into my store when she might not otherwise come in."

Ritchie and Marshall are correct, and I was wrong. As long as the retailer from whom Schwanke almost bought the freezer attached no strings to use of the coupons, using them would be perfectly fair. Nobody would suffer for it, and she and the food stores might both benefit.

THY NEIGHBOR'S TRASH.

A reader was concerned that, when their trash can was filled, her husband was putting their excess trash into the trash can of their neighbor, who has unused space. The neighbor had noticed, grown irate and eventually expressed her displeasure by depositing the garbage atop the husband's car.

In May I told my reader that her husband was wrong, and that he should seek permission before placing his excess trash in his neighbor's barrels.

"This is ridiculous," one reader wrote. "What difference does it make to the woman if he puts trash in her trash to be picked up? It's ludicrous that she gets upset."

Trash pickup seems to trigger vehement emotions among my readers. I had another 2008 column relating to this subject -- concerning an overzealous trash collector who made off with a reader's recyclables -- and it too drew some passionate responses.

In this case, though, I have to stick with my original response. I agree that the neighbor overreacted, but she was right to resent the husband's trash deposit. Her trash cans are not public wastebaskets and, in any case, many municipalities prohibit the depositing of household trash in public wastebaskets. They're her cans, so she gets to decide what goes in them. If he wanted to do the right thing, the husband should have asked permission.

IKEA ADS DISASSEMBLED.

"You'd have to be pretty dense not to pick up on the humor of the Ikea ads that poke fun at shoppers mistakenly thinking that they are taking advantage of what are permanently low prices," wrote Charlie Seng of Lancaster, S.C. "Your reader who was annoyed by the ad is a person looking to be annoyed."

I found the ad amusing, but wondered if Ikea had missed the boat by not considering having a consumer in the ad argue with the clerk that she had rung up a price that was too low. This would have shone a light on customers who try to be honest, instead of on those who try to get away with something.

I don't believe my reader missed the humor of the ad, any more than I did. I think that serious points can be made through humor, however, and I'd have liked to see Ikea work harder to do the right thing in its ads.

UNFORBIDDEN FRUIT.

Finally, in August a reader in Cypress, Calif., wondered if it would be wrong to pick a lemon or two from a tree that hangs over the fence of a nearby house and onto the nearby sidewalk. Her husband had told her that it would be wrong. She wasn't so sure.

I felt that the right thing to do would again involve getting permission from the tree's owner.

Gerald Boyden of Anaheim, Calif., was among a number of readers taking issue with my response.

"That fruit is considered to be residing `in the public domain,"' Boyden wrote. "It belongs to anyone who cares to claim it. There is no violation of ethics involved."

I noted in the original column that there was nothing wrong with helping oneself from a legal point of view, because Cypress has no ordinance against picking overhanging fruit. But what's legal is not always what's ethical, and most of the time ethical behavior requires more than simply not violating the law.

The law may not take cognizance of the fact that the tree has been raised, watered, nourished, tended and maintained by its owner, not by passers-by. Ethical considerations do take that fact into account, however, so I still think that the right thing is to ask the owner's permission. Legalities aside, it's the civil and fair thing to do, and therefore it's the ethical choice to make.

I know my readers will continue to do the right thing by sharing their wisdom with me by e-mailing me at rightthing@nytimes.com as the new year progresses.

c.2009 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: THE BEST OF YEARS, THE WORST OF YEARS

It's time for my annual look back at some of the more egregious ethical lapses that have plagued the previous twelve months.

As always, I also offer positive alternatives to the questionable actions of many high-profile people in the news. I believe that as much can be learned from those people who do the right thing as from those who don't.

GETTING OBAMA OFF ON THE WRONG FOOT.

On January 20, Inauguration Day, a sea of people will descend on Washington to witness the swearing-in of a new president. Lodging will likely be scarce. Some residents are offering up their well-placed apartments for $1,000 a day. Hotels are charging a premium for any rooms not already booked.

None of that is unethical per se, but some people are going too far. Recently ads on Craigslist were offering to sell hotel reservations for a nonrefundable $300. This doesn't include the cost of the minimum four-night stay at the hotel, which will add more than $1,000 to the tab. Essentially, as The Washington Post points out, some guy wants you to pay him $300 to make a reservation for you!

Compare this to Earl Stafford, founder of a Virginia technology company, who paid $1 million to book hotel rooms to accommodate wounded soldiers, poor people and others who couldn't afford to participate in the inauguration otherwise. According to The New York Times, "He said he wanted to help people who have worked hard and done everything right but who find themselves without a job or home."

EVERYONE (OF YOU) WILL HAVE TO SACRIFICE.

Not a week had passed, after the federal government's $85 billion bailout of the insurance company AIG, before some of its executives were treated to a spa vacation, running up a tab totaling more than $440,000. This, after AIG's CEO had told Congress that the company was facing a "financial global tsunami."

Financial tsunamis can make seasoned executives lose their poise, but doling out expensive vacations while crying poverty in an effort to get ahold of government funds suggests that these ones also lost their senses.

The incongruity was lost on AIG's leaders, but it didn't escape some university presidents who were asking their institutions to tighten their belts. Among them were Mark Wrighton, president of Washington University in St. Louis, who announced that he would take a 5-percent cut in his base salary come Jan. 1, and another 5-percent cut on July 1.

It packs a bit more ethical oomph, if you're asking people to tighten their belts, when you're willing to tighten your own.

WHEN GOOD MEN SAY STUPID THINGS.

To start with some disclosure: The actor and comedian Denis Leary is a graduate of, and a generous alumnus of, Emerson College, where I teach. My wife is a therapist who works with autistic children.

Leary has taken some hits for his new book, in which he attributes the boom in autism cases to "inattentive mothers and competitive dads" who throw money away to have their children diagnosed "to explain away their deficiencies."

His quote was taken out of context, Leary insists. And, to be fair, there are indeed some parents who look for any reason to explain their children's behavior other than their own lack of parenting skills. Had he simply stopped there, he might have done some good by addressing parental responsibility.

If you read on, however, Leary reveals a virtually complete lack of understanding of the process of autism diagnosis. In other words, in context the quote puts Leary in an even worse light than it does when pulled out and left to stand on its own.

OK, everyone has a right to an opinion, however wrongheaded. In the opinion of many highly trained professionals, including the one at my breakfast table, Leary's take on the issue is absurd. But that isn't itself unethical.

It reaches that level, however, when he uses his celebrity status to air his views to a readership who, themselves knowing little about the subject, don't realize how uninformed he is and may even take seriously the facetious byline, "Dr. Denis Leary" -- his only doctorate, I believe, is an honorary one from Emerson. It's especially unethical if, as I suspect, he overstates his own opinion for the sake of a laugh.

Also guilty of substandard ethics: Leary's publisher, Viking. Leary is used to spouting off-the-cuff rants onstage, and may not know any other way to work. Viking doesn't have that excuse. It's the job of any reputable publisher to make sure that what it prints is fair, accurate and not likely to do harm to others.

Groups such as Parents of Autistic Children -- at www.poac.net -- whose purpose is to help families with an autistic child get services and learn to cope day-to-day, don't enjoy Leary's spotlight. Nonetheless, they and the many service providers who work with them have a far deeper understanding of this issue, and it's a pity that their insights won't receive the circulation that Leary's have.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: PARDON MY PARDON

Roughly 89 percent of the readers who responded to an unscientific poll on my column's blog thought that it was unethical for a president to pardon someone whose illegal actions may have involved him or his administration.

The most thoughtful response comes from Sean O'Leary, a reader in Harpers Ferry, W.Va.

"Pardons of all kinds can be just, compassionate and even necessary," he writes, "because they can take into account a wider range of factors than might be considered pertinent in a court of law. Just pardons increase accountability by making more known and taking more into consideration ... Granting a presidential pardon to a crony whose crimes are a matter of public record is less troubling than granting a pardon for the specific purpose of preventing the crimes underlying the pardon from being fully investigated and becoming a matter of public record ... Just pardons increase accountability. Unjust pardons reduce accountability."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: GET OUT OF MY FACEBOOK

The New York Times and other media have reported that people seeking to work in the White House for the Obama administration are being required to provide vetters with, among other things, links to any blog posts they've made, links to their Facebook pages and "all aliases or `handles' you have used to communicate on the Internet."

Granted, work in the White House is likely to involve more sensitive issues than you'll come across in most workplaces. But employers can use the way prospective employees project themselves on the Internet as a screen for employment decisions, even if these things are not part of the official application process.

Should employers use Facebook pages, Myspace pages or blog posts to determine whether an otherwise qualified candidate with a solid work history and strong recommendations gets a job?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll about this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: THE THINGS WE LEAVE BEHIND

When my friend Bruce went to clear out his mother's house after she died, he found labels attached to every physical thing in the house, from furniture to trinkets in old dresser drawers. His mother had lived alone for some time and, preparing for the day when she would no longer be around, had decided to make life a little easier on her only child. The labels bore instructions about where each of her belongings should go after her passing.

Bruce's story reminded me of a time I was visiting one of my college professors. As I was leaving her house, I admired a framed, antique print of the college campus that hung in her foyer. She lifted the print off the wall and showed me how it had been passed from one professor to another, each leaving instructions on the back of the print as to who should receive it upon his or her death. Hers was only the latest among many handwritten notes on the print.

I've long thought that the approach taken by Bruce's mother and by my college professor in directing how their possessions should be disposed of shows great thoughtfulness. Their wishes upon death were made clear, avoiding any number of subsequent conflicts.

Sadly, more often than not, such desires are not made clear.

Ten years ago, for example, the mother of four sisters died. The oldest of the sisters always had thought that, as the eldest, she would be the recipient of her mother's jewelry. Upon her mother's death, however, one of her younger sisters took possession of the jewelry.

"It's mostly costume jewelry," the oldest sister adds, "having more sentimental than monetary value."

Initially the sisters could not bring themselves to discuss sharing their mother's jewelry, because it brought up too many emotions. But now my reader and her younger sisters are finally meeting to try to distribute the jewelry.

"Should the jewelry traditionally go to the eldest when there are four sisters?" my reader asks.

In this case, obviously, it didn't -- so apparently that wasn't this family's tradition. But my reader's real question is whether it's the right thing for the eldest daughter in a family to get all the jewelry.

The short answer: No. Absent legal instructions, or a note attached to the jewelry, there is no ethical reason for any one child to be favored over the others.

By not leaving instructions prior to her death, my reader's mother essentially employed a strategy used by many parents in an effort to help their children learn to get along: If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the words, "Work it out among yourselves," wafting over the four women.

The right thing for them to do now is to gather so that each can express her desires. My reader can express her view that, as the oldest daughter, she is entitled to keep the whole lot. Because her mother never expressed that desire, however, she may have a hard time convincing her sisters. A better goal would be to achieve some agreement on how the jewelry can be shared to everyone's satisfaction.

Granted, 10 years is a long time to wait to decide the right thing to do. But we can't read the minds of those who have died. Some things simply take time to work out among ourselves.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

ECONOWHINER.COM ON ETHICS

"How has this economic downturn forced you to make ethical choices in your business or personal life? What do you see happening in the world around you?"

Those two questions are the tag on an interview with me posted this morning on the Econowhiner website, a website whose tagline is: "Surviving and Thriving in Tough Times."

The interview grew out of a question Econowhiner received from a reader about choosing not to layoff her employees and instead cutting her own paycheck to keep them on. I've written about the ethics of layoffs before in The Right Thing column, in "In Downsizing, Loyalty is a Two-Way Street." That was back in 2001, during an economic downturn that pales in comparison to what we're experiencing today.

What the Econowhiner interview gets at is whether very tough economic times force people to make ethical decisions differently. You might want to take a look at the interview by clicking here.

You can post comments here or on the Econowhiner website.

THE RIGHT THING: A DEATH THREAT IN THE TRASH

"Here's an ethical question for you," the mother of a fourth grader writes. "If a student writes a note in anger, threatening to do something, but then throws the note away before giving it to anyone, should he still be punished?"

My reader's 9-year-old son was playing with a folded-up piece of paper that he had made into a football that he could flick around his school desktop with his fingers. Another student in the class kept grabbing the paper football from the 9-year-old. This upset him, but he continued to grab back his football until his classmate finally captured it and held it too firmly for the 9-year-old to retrieve.

The 9-year-old took out a piece of paper and scribbled a note to the football thief.

"Give me back my football," he wrote in pencil, "or I'll kill you."

He stared at the note for a moment, then thought better of delivering it. Instead he crumpled it up and threw it into a waste basket.

A third student saw the paper in the wastebasket and retrieved it. He uncrumpled it, read the scrawled message and was alarmed. So he gave the note to the recess monitor.

All of this took place late on a Monday afternoon, with no school that Tuesday. As the 9-year-old was getting ready to go home, the monitor approached him.

"You will have to meet with your teacher and me on Wednesday," the monitor said, "to discuss that note you wrote."

When the 9-year-old's mother, my reader, picked him up at school, he settled into the back seat. She asked how his day had been, and he burst out crying.

"I never want to go back to that school," he repeated over and over through his tears.

It's important to know that the 9-year-old never had been in trouble at school for any minor misbehavior, let alone anything violent. His grades are strong, and he has many friends. And it's even more important to remember that, while the language in the note was strong for an era of zero tolerance of any hint of violence in schools, he had crumpled it up and thrown it away.

After sweating it out for two days, my reader's son returned to school. During recess he was told to stay in and talk to his teacher and the recess monitor. His punishment: Writing a letter of apology to the student who had been spooked after retrieving the original note.

Calming the garbage picker seemed wise, so my reader's son wrote the apology without complaint.

From an ethical standpoint, however, the 9-year-old had nothing to apologize for. He did the right thing at the outset, when he used his judgment to discern that the note he had written in haste was wrong and again when he threw it away.

On the other hand, the teachers failed by not addressing the incident on the day that it happened, particularly since there was no school the next day. Making the 9-year-old agonize about what his punishment might be, imagining everything from no recess to expulsion, showed poor judgment at best. They weren't trying to teach him a lesson by making him wait, they simply failed to use common sense in resolving the issue.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: LOVE IN THE WORKPLACE

Is it a company's place to dictate who can and cannot fall in love in the workplace? According to 37 percent of the readers who responded to an informal poll on my column's blog, the answer is yes. The remaining 63 percent said no.

"Only bad things can happen during an office romance," one reader writes.

On the other hand, while Megan Chromik of Cambridge, Mass., thinks that a workplace relationship can make work difficult, she still doesn't believe that "a company should have the right to say who can and can't date and fall in love."

R.K., a reader in Florida, thinks the company should and does have that right.

"Aren't employers entitled to prohibit such employee relationships?" R.K. asks. "It's sad when trouble arises from the deceit that secretive office couples sometimes engage in."

"It crosses an ethical line for a boss to `strike up an affair' with someone at the office," writes Phil Clutts of Harrisburg, N.C. "But, if genuine romance evolves from working together, it's not the company's business if the relationship doesn't affect the company or either party's future in it in any way."

R. Brooks of Fullerton, Calif., takes a similar hands-off line.

"How else are hardworking people to meet other people?" Brooks observes. "The workplace is a prime place to meet people with similar interests."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: GAMBLING ON A RESUME

Recently J. Terrence Lanni resigned as the CEO of the MGM Mirage hotel in Las Vegas. He did so after The Wall Street Journal raised questions about whether he actually held an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California, as company publicity materials claimed he did. USC told the Journal that it had no record of his degree. Lanni said, however, that his resignation had nothing to do with the allegations.

More and more top executives are finding their academic credentials questioned. Do you think an executive should be asked to resign if it is discovered that he or she has listed false academic information on a resume?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll about this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: A CAN PLAN CRUSHED

Many neighbors seek out Dodie for advice. A regular reader of this column in southern California, she tries her best to help out when she can -- but sometimes she is simply flummoxed as to how to respond.

That was the case recently, when a friend came to her with a question about her trash company.

It seems that her friend regularly puts out her trash on the curb alongside her recycling bins for pickup. Recently, however, the garbage men not only picked up what had been left on her curb, but also walked into her yard and carried off the recycling that she had stored in bags leaning against her house.

The bags clearly had not been left for trash pickup, so the friend called the trash company to see if she could "get the situation fixed." The company explained that, unfortunately, the driver was new and didn't know better than to walk into her yard and take something that was on her private property.

This fell a little short of an apology, but my reader's friend was hoping for more than an apology. She is a single mother, raising a young teenager, and had counted on the money from recycling her own cans to help with her daughter's soccer costs. An apology would be welcome, but wouldn't address her basic problem.

Dodie wants to know the right thing for the trash company to do.

Every municipality has its own code regarding things such as trash pickup. Apparently there's nothing explicit in Dodie's town code that indicates that a law was broken, but it seems pretty clear that the trash collector overstepped his bounds here.

What's more, in its list of residential services, the disposal company specifically defines the type and size of trash containers and stipulates that all trash must be placed at curbside. Trash improperly packaged or not placed at curbside will not be picked up. Therefore the trash collector broke his own company's policy when he went into the friend's yard to pick up the garbage bags full of recycling.

Clearly there's no malice involved here. The trash collector was doubtless well-intentioned and thought that he was doing the resident a favor by hauling off garbage bags that he wasn't technically obliged to remove. Nonetheless, he had no right to go into the yard to do so. Grabbing every bag in sight is beyond his call of duty, and sooner or later was bound to result in him taking stuff that people had no intention of throwing away. I can recall some early moves to new apartments in which I carted all of my belongings in green garbage bags.

Placing aside the law -- since I am, after all, not a lawyer -- and focusing on the ethics of the situation -- since I am, after all, an ethics columnist -- an apology would be a good first step. If the trash company wants to do the right thing, however, having admitted that the bag of recyclables was taken mistakenly, it should consider reimbursing her for the cash value of the cans that she lost. Or it might consider crediting her trash-collection bill for that day's pickup.

Even when the economy is not forcing people to watch costs and be more meticulous about returning cans for deposit, the stuff we store on our lawns should be safe from over-vigilant garbage collectors. The company should do whatever it can to ensure that a young girl's soccer plans are not trashed.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

The Right Thing Stories

For the weekly newspaper ethics column I write for the New York Times Syndicate called "The Right Thing," I am always looking for stories of ethical challenges, dilemmas, and perplexing situations. If you have such a story or question based on an incident and would like it to be considered for the column, please email it to me at rightthing@nytimes.com. (Or you can post it here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below.

Please make sure to include enough details about the story, the issue that you're wrestling with, and your name and the city and state or province where you are located. Include a way for me to contact you.

If you know of others who might have interesting stories, please forward this email on to them.

If you're local paper doesn't carry The Right Thing column and you'd like it to, you can send an email to the editor of the paper suggesting they contact the New York Times Syndicate. Contact information is available at http://nytsyn.com/saleinfo.html. (Or contact Sales Manager Ana Muñoz at munoza@nytimes.com or 212.499.3333 and tell her the name of your local newspaper that you believe should be carrying the column.)

Thanks in advance for your stories.

THE RIGHT THING: LIVING UP TO IT

Here's a tip to all service providers, from retail establishments and contractors to teachers and medical professionals: If you say that you're going to do something, do it.

Now, this isn't a call for these professionals to do any more than they're already doing, and it's not a swipe at the quality of care being offered. Instead it's a demand -- when it comes to doing something you commit to do -- to put up or shut up.

A reader from Columbus, Ohio, recently booked an examination with her physician. During the exam several tests were performed, and shortly after the appointment she called to ask for the results of these tests. She was told to call back a week later. When she called back, a nurse did tell her the results. My reader wanted to know if she would get a fuller report in writing, however, and the nurse told her that she would get it by mail, but that it would take some time.

Several weeks after the initial exam, no written test results having arrived, my reader called again. The nurse told her that something must have happened to the report in the mail, and said that she would send it again.

Once again, however, my reader never received the results.

She has gone online to find a "Patient Bill of Rights," which she plans to print out. Then she'll write a note demanding her test results and take both documents in person to the doctor's office to get a copy of her test results.

"What do you think of putting a patient off," my reader asks, "not giving the patient what is rightfully his or hers? This smacks of unethical treatment, especially when the matter could be serious/important to one's health."

If the doctor's office indeed was putting off my reader, or if it merely takes a long time to send off test results, that is certainly a nuisance for my reader to deal with, but I'm not convinced that it would rise to the level of unethical conduct. Everything that inconveniences us cannot be chalked up as unethical. Some things are simply a pain in the neck -- not my reader's medical issue, by the way.

Granted, our need to know about medical issues is far more urgent than our need to hear back from a contractor for whom we've been leaving messages. But not getting information or service as fast as we want it doesn't usually indicate a moral failing on the part of the provider.

Where my reader does have a legitimate ethical beef, however, is with the nurse who told her that she would send the material and then apparently didn't follow up by sending it. If she had no intention of sending the material, she should have told my reader so and also told her why. Or, if she didn't plan to send the results for several weeks, she should have told her that.

To promise to do something that you have no intention of doing is lying, nothing more or less. None of us should feel cozy about doing business with anyone who lies to us to get us off their backs. The right thing to do, for the nurse and for all service providers, is not to make promises they don't plan to keep.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: IS COMPUTER ART CHEATING?

An overwhelming number of readers -- 83 percent of those who responded to an unscientific poll on my column's blog -- see no harm in sculptors using computers to help them with the design of their art. It's not cheating, they feel.

"Oh, please," Shmuel Ross of Brooklyn writes. "Of course, it's legitimate."

"As long as the final product of this artist is his own work," another reader agrees, "it is `straining at a gnat' to worry more than one minute over the computer-assisted work."

"Artists need to plan their works somehow," Chase March of Hamilton, Ontario, writes. "In the end, art is art. We are left with the final piece, and a computer can't ever produce that."

Or, as Chris Rand of Boston puts it, "Da Vinci had notebooks."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: PARDON ME?

It is common practice for outgoing presidents of the United States to grant pardons as they are heading out the door. Among the recent notable pardons were those by President George H.W. Bush of Iran-Contra convicts to whom Bush may have had a connection, and by President Bill Clinton of indicted financier Marc Rich, whose ex-wife had contributed to Clinton's campaign fund.

Such pardons are unquestionably legal, and indeed are a long tradition of the presidency, but are they ethical? In particular, is it ethical for a president to pardon someone whose illegal actions may have involved him or his administration?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll about this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: FRONT-ROW CHEATS?

As teenagers growing up in northern New Jersey, my friends and I would regularly hop the Lakeland Bus for the 45-minute ride into Manhattan. There we would catch the subway up to the Bronx and get off at Yankee Stadium.

We'd purchase the cheapest box seats we could get our hands on. Occasionally, however, by the time the fourth or fifth inning rolled around, we'd notice that some of the better, more expensive seats closer to the field were unoccupied. We'd make our way down the stadium steps and plunk ourselves into seats that were beyond our means but were more suited to our desired view.

Only once did an usher ask to see our tickets -- in that case, it turned out, the seats' rightful occupants had simply gone on a beer run and been upset to find their seats usurped. We didn't get kicked out of the park, though, simply sent back to our cheap seats.

Christie Coombs of Orange, Calif., can afford more expensive seats to sporting events than I could as a teenager, but she nonetheless found herself in a similar situation recently.

"I bought the most expensive daily seat for a day at a tennis tournament," she writes, "and the seat was so high that I almost needed binoculars."

The best seats in the front sections are often gobbled up by sponsors, she says, but nonetheless go empty. Toward the end of the day, Coombs and some friends moved down to sit in the most expensive seats.

"I felt guilty," she writes, "but they were great seats."

Coombs knows that it's wrong to sit in seats you didn't pay for, she says, but she thinks it would be nice if sponsors would release any seats they don't plan to use so that others can be allowed to move into them. At another tournament she attended, the public-address announcer told spectators that they were welcome to move down into the empty seats in front.

But when no such go-ahead is given, Coombs wants to know, "Is there any harm in moving into the empty seats?"

Ideally, organizers would make an announcement when it's OK to move forward, but it may be that they don't do so for fear of a stampede of fans.

Absent such an announcement, the ticket you buy entitles you to sit in the seat printed on the ticket. It is not a license to use that seat as a base from which to secure the best seat you can find. You have, therefore, no right to sit in a better seat, regardless of whether or not that seat is empty.

Rights and opportunities are two different things, of course. So long as you don't buy the cheaper seats solely with the intention of sneaking into the more expensive ones once you're inside, I say no harm, no foul in taking an opportunity to move into empty seats for a better view, if such an opportunity arises.

You might, of course, ask an usher if it's OK to move into the empty seats, or you might simply take your chances. Remember, though, that if told by the usher that moving is not permitted, or if ejected from seats you've moved into without tickets, you are not being treated unfairly. You don't have a right to those seats, and you aren't being deprived of what's rightfully yours.

The right thing is to go to the event with the intention of staying in the seats you've paid for. If you see empty seats further forward, however, it's not wrong to move.

Some venues may have a policy of evicting any fans who try to move to better seats. That's their privilege, of course, and, so long as the policy is clearly stated, you should comply with it. If caught in seats not your own, you should leave the stadium quietly.

At a time when revenues are paramount and those revenues are driven by fan satisfaction, however, that's a silly policy, if you ask me. As long as the fans are willing to move back to their seats when asked, why not let them enjoy the game?

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: WHERE I STAND

This column marks the 250th time "The Right Thing" has appeared as a weekly newspaper column. What began in September 1998 as a monthly business-ethics column evolved into a weekly general-ethics column in February 2004.

Throughout the life of the column, there have been serious ethics eruptions in the news. Sometimes these take the form of corporate CEOs engaging in behavior that is not in the interest of shareholders, employees or the public. Occasionally they involve politicians who stridently portray themselves as protectors of the public good while themselves engaging in lascivious, illegal or unethical behavior. And don't get me started on celebrities who cross ethical lines as often as they partake of the latest herbal wrap.

When such eruptions occur, readers or others invariably chime in with the observation that, in an era of abundant malfeasance, it must be good to be an ethics columnist. That may be true, but it has nothing to do with the plethora of ethically questionable targets that happens to be available to me. There is no joy in seeing others stray wildly from doing the right thing.

It's not, after all, these egregious ethical lapses that present us with our great daily challenges. We know outright wrong when we see it. What has been the challenge for many of my column's readers -- and for me -- is to choose the best answer when we are faced with multiple right choices. Whether you're wondering how fully to disclose your intentions to an employer, how careful to be about using someone else's copyrighted work, how to leave a relationship with your character intact or how to run for office without losing your soul, the challenge is how to think through the choices to come up with the best right answer.

Because people approach ethical choices from different perspectives, it's not surprising that different people choose different right answers. Someone guided by rules might likely arrive at a different conclusion than someone who is driven by the interest of the greater good for the most people, regardless of the rules. My job is to help sort out the questions you should ask in trying to decide the right course of action.

I bring up all of this because readers regularly ask me why I can't simply tell them what to do in a given situation. Short answer: Because that's not how ethical decision-making works. My job is to tell you, my readers, what I believe to be the right thing to do and why I feel that way, based on the information you provide me and the details I collect myself. To think through the situation and decide the best right choice to make is not my job, but yours.

What I hope is that, through seeing how other readers cope with ethical choices, every reader can come away wondering how he or she would react in the same situation, and perhaps begin to give more thought to the consequences of actions before engaging in them.

And, no, Dave in Massachusetts, I do not believe that advising your wife to hit her co-worker back, simply because the co-worker didn't receive a sufficient reprimand from the bosses, is the right thing to do.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: MINING THE DUMP

The majority of readers -- 64 percent -- who participated in an unscientific poll on my column's blog didn't see anything wrong with taking goods from public-dump swap shops, turning around and selling them on eBay or Craig's List.

Some questioned the practice: "I would think very poorly of an individual who deprived a would-be needy user of the free item by taking it to sell for his or her own personal gain," writes Phil Clutts of Harrisburg, N.C.

But William Jacobson of Cypress, Calif., sees nothing wrong with it.

"These swap shops are merely repositories for items that would otherwise be destroyed," Jacobson writes. "If the new owner can resell them for a profit, more power to him. Capitalism is founded upon the notion that one man's junk is another man's treasure."

Alan Sechrest of Mission Viejo, Calif., agrees.

"If the items are offered by the dump with no stated preconditions such as `only for personal use,' then the items may be sold with no ethical concerns," Sechrest says. "It's like a gift: Once received, the recipient is free to do with it whatever they please."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: CONSENTING ADULTS IN THE WORKPLACE

The head of the International Monetary Fund has been cleared of wrongdoing in having had an affair with one of his staffers. The fund's board decided that, because the relationship was consensual, no harm, no foul.

The news reminded me of the first "The Right Thing" column I wrote, a little more than 10 years ago, which was about relationships in the workplace and the havoc they can wreak. At that time some institutions were beginning to introduce "love contracts," in which both parties agree to indemnify the business should the relationship turn sour.

According to a more recent survey by the Society of Human Resource Management and Careerjournal.com, as of 2006 48 percent of companies permitted but discouraged workplace romances, while 31 percent did not permit office romances.

Where such affairs can really run into trouble is when a boss has a relationship with someone further down the employee ranks. But is it a company's place to dictate who can and who cannot fall in love in the workplace? Does a boss cross an ethical line when he or she strikes up an affair with someone at the office?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.

You can also respond to the poll about this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business (Smith Kerr, 2006), is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: JUDGING A MEAL BY ITS BOX

"Election year or not," Dennis Akren writes, "this is what folks really want to know."

Is he talking about the economy? Health care? The wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan or on terror?

No. What has Akren flummoxed is shrimp scampi.

Akren, a teacher in Ladera Ranch, Calif., is none too happy about the shrimp scampi sold in the frozen-foods section of his supermarket.

Recently he purchased a 10-ounce, single-serving package of the dish, basing his decision on the mouthwatering photograph on the cover of the box -- a tantalizing color photo depicting 11 shrimp on a plate mixed with some pasta and diced tomatoes.

I've seen the photo. It is indeed tempting to any hungry shopper who hankers for a serving of shrimp sauteed with garlic and lemon butter.

When Akren cooked up his meal, however, only six shrimp graced his plate. Compared to the box illustration, he was five shrimp short.

Granted, many recipes for shrimp scampi call for 1.5 pounds of shrimp to serve four people. If we're talking large shrimp, that translates roughly to 33 shrimp, which is eight shrimp per helping. So six shrimp doesn't seem far off the mark for a reasonable single serving.

That's beside Akren's point, though. His issue is the packaging.

"Showing 11, yet giving only six, seems hardly fair or ethical," he writes.

Thinking his first experience might have been a fluke, he cooked up another batch two nights later. Still only six shrimp, from a box that still showed 11.

When he buys a six-piece Chicken McNuggets dish from McDonald's, Akren says, he expects to get six McNuggets, and does. But in that case the number is clearly specified on the menu.

"But what about when you can only go by the picture?," he asks. "Is it unethical for the company to clearly have less product in the actual meal than the picture may show? Shouldn't the company be called on it? They are essentially doubling their profit because they are only putting half of the featured food in the actual meal."

Government agencies in both the United States and Canada do have regulations forbidding deceptive advertising. Nothing on the packaging lists the number of shrimp in a given package, however, and the photo bears the caption "serving suggestion," so it's unlikely that regulatory agencies will take these companies to food court.

Still, however legal it may be, is it ethical for companies to pump up their plates to draw in consumers? Clearly, when it says "serving suggestion," the company isn't implying that the consumer should purchase another five shrimp to toss into the meal -- or is it?

There's nothing wrong with companies doing their best to make their food look as scrumptious as possible on the packaging, utilizing professional preparation, expert lighting and clever camera angles to show themselves at their best. In this case, however, Akren does have a legitimate gripe. It's wrong for companies to package their products in depictions that clearly misrepresent the contents.

Gifted food stylists can make a plate of six shrimp on pasta look as good as one with 11 shrimp. The right thing for this company to do is either to beef up the shrimp content to match the depiction on the box or to reshoot its packaging photography to more accurately reflect what's inside. Not to do so is misleading. Whether or not this is the issue that people really want to know about this election year depends, I suppose, on how hungry they are.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

THE RIGHT THING: IT TAKES A THIEF ... OR DOES IT?

A reader from London, Ontario, manages the lawn care for the condominium complex in which she lives. One of the lawn-care workers came to her residence after finding several identity cards while working in a garden in the complex.

My reader knew the owner of the cards, who was another resident of the condominium, so she took them and returned them to their owner. In doing so she learned that the resident's wallet had been stolen. The thief apparently had ditched the identity cards while going through the wallet, which remained unaccounted for, along with the rest of its contents.

Later that day the same worker came to my reader's door again. He hadn't found the stolen wallet, but he had come across drug paraphernalia in the same vicinity where he had found the identity cards. The paraphernalia was sitting on the rear-window ledge of a condo unit where a young man lives with his father.

"Maybe the two incidents are related," my reader writes, "maybe it was just a coincidence."

Motivated by concern and, she insists, "without making any judgments," she went to speak with the father of the young man. She let him know what had been found on the rear windowsill of his condo, and the father said that he would "handle it."

My reader has not told anyone else in the community about the incident, nor has she asked the father what action he took, if any.

"It seems, however, very likely that the son was the owner of the `stuff,"' she writes.

Her concerns were given a new immediacy, however, when a second neighbor told her how wonderful she thinks the son is, and mentioned that he helps her with all of her electronic questions in her condo.

"So he is in her house fairly often," my reader writes.

You know what's coming: My reader wonders whether or not she should tell the second neighbor what happened earlier.

She is, of course, wrestling with a common and often agonizing question. Does she owe it to the son not to sully his reputation, granted that she has no proof that the drug paraphernalia was his, let alone that he was involved in the theft of the wallet? Or does she owe it to her second neighbor to share her suspicions about the son, since if her suspicions are correct her neighbor's security is obviously at risk?

The right thing for my reader is not to say nothing. If something were to happen to the second neighbor, she would be rightfully upset at my reader for not alerting her to the situation.

That doesn't mean, however, that she should rush over to warn her friend that there's a thieving drug addict in her living room. As she points out, the two incidents may or may not have been connected, and for that matter she has no real proof that the drug paraphernalia belonged to the son -- it might have been the father's, for example. If she said as much to the second neighbor, she might be wrongfully accusing her teenage neighbor.

The right thing for my reader to do is to urge the second neighbor to exercise extreme caution about letting people into her apartment. It's entirely fair to mention that a neighbor had his wallet stolen and that drug paraphernalia has been found in the area -- these are facts, and she not only can but should share them with her neighbor.

Armed with the facts, but not with unproven speculation, the second neighbor can draw her own conclusions. It's quite possible that she'll decide to find someone else to help set the clock on her VCR. If she doesn't, however, my reader should back off. Having conveyed the facts of the situation, she's done all she can or ought to do.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: A TAXING SITUATION

The majority of readers who responded to an unscientific poll on my column's blog believe that Rep. Charles Rangel (D.-N.Y.) should step down as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, as a result of his failure to include in his tax return rental income from a vacation home he owns in a Dominican Republic resort.

Neal White of Atlanta shares the opinion of 66 percent of my readers who believe that Rep. Rangel should step down from his committee post.

"Absolutely, Congressman Charlie Rangel should resign his post as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee," White writes.

Should his misstep also cost him his seat in the House? Yes, replied 19 percent of my respondents.

But 15 percent of those taking the poll said that Rangel should keep both his seat and his chairmanship.

"Tax laws are convoluted," writes William Jacobson of Cypress, Calif., "and any of us might be guilty of the same lapse under IRS review. Let him do what the rest of us do: Pay the lapse, pay a (probably very stiff) fine and move on."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

SOUND OFF: IF IT'S COMPUTER-ASSISTED, IS IT ART?

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Ben Worthen asked if sculptor Brue Beasley was "cheating" by using computer-assisted design to assemble a sculpture "virtually" before he actually sets out to sculpt the piece. Beasley tells him that artists have always found ways to make themselves more efficient.

"I can deal with a greater degree of complexity than if I was doing it by hand," Beasley says.

Worthen doesn't answer his own question about whether Beasley's approach is "cheating," so I'm putting the question to my readers: Are sculptors who rely on technology to ease the burden of creating art cheating? Or is it a legitimate part of the artistic process to make use of all available technologies? Are there limits?

Post your thoughts here by clicking on "comments" or "post a comment" below. Please include your name, hometown, and state, province, or country. Readers' comments may appear in an upcoming column. Or e-mail your comments to me at rightthing@nytimes.com.You can also respond to the poll about this question that will appear on the right-hand side of the blog until polling is closed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of