The Right Thing

Sunday, January 18, 2026

The problem with "repurposing"

How much honesty do I owe my readers?

I have a wicked head cold. Mostly, the symptoms are a persistent hacking cough, running nose and tiredness. The last of these likely results from waking myself up every hour or so with that hacking cough. I’ve been to the doctor, I am taking medication, drinking lots of fluids and taking a copious amount of naps.

It is a bit difficult to concentrate, but truth be told, I had the head cold when I wrote last week’s column and no one, near as I can tell, found it any worse for the wear. But I’m more exhausted this week and still have a bit of prep work to do for a couple of courses I agreed to start teaching a week ago.

My best friend called and suggested I “repurpose” an old column. Since I’ve been writing The Right Thing column since 1998, he’s convinced no one will be the wiser. He uses words like “repurpose,” he says because he’s a former Hollywood writer and regularly repurposed stuff.

The only other time someone suggested I use an old column rather than write a new one was after my father died during COVID. My editor at the time was sympathetic to how challenging a time it was and offered me the chance to re-run an old column.

In neither case, did I seize the opportunity. Given that I’m now writing the 1,200th Right Thing column, there’s certainly enough material to draw upon. It’s also quite likely that there’s been some overlap in the types of topics I’ve written about over the years, although those have been inadvertent. I will admit, however, that there are times I sit down to write a column and have to search through the old columns to make sure I haven’t written the same column before. Forty-seven years is a long time and, particularly when I have a head cold, it’s highly likely I don’t remember everything I’ve written.

But I look at it this way: It would be misleading to present an old column as a new one to my readers. Some readers might not care, but I do. So I soldier on and write about the importance of being honest with my readers.

There might be a time when I decide to consider repurposing an old column. I don’t anticipate doing so, but if I do, the right thing would be to let readers know that the column is one that ran before. That would be the honest approach. If I do give it a try, I may find out that an occasional greatest hit from the archives is something readers would appreciate. Few of you, after all, have been with me since 1998 when I started, something about which I was made painfully aware when four graduate students told me that weren’t yet born then.

My promise to you is to be honest and as transparent as possible.

But now I have an appointment with a bowl of homemade chicken soup made by my wife. Unlike those grad students, she has read every column I’ve written since 1998. Those are only two of the many reasons that she remains the woman I’d eat bees for.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

Sunday, January 11, 2026

Looking back at another year of doing the right thing

A year ago, at the end of 2024, after looking at the analytics for the website where The Right Thing weekly column gets posted after it has run in publications that carry it, it was clear that readers were most drawn to columns that focused on being an engaged citizen, companies that prop up bad behavior in advertisements, learning to lose gracefully, not allowing pretension to get in the way of our message, and whether companies are obligated to honor commitments even if they were made in jest.

In 2025, the five columns viewed the most touched on the reliability of artificial intelligence, Googling prospective acquaintances, full disclosure by product reviewers, letting online friends know you were cutting ties and trusting columnists without checking their facts.

The fifth-most viewed column, “If a columnist tells you something, check it out,” ran in late August. In it, I recounted how a news program once misidentified my profession and how I’d recently misspoke on a podcast interview. In each instance, I felt the importance of acknowledging the error and urged readers to double-check facts before they spread them as gospel.

A July column, “Should I tell a social media friend that I’m cutting them?” reassured a reader there was nothing unethical about pruning the list of people she connects with online without feeling compelled to alert them they were being dumped or added.

The answer to “Should reviewers disclose receiving compensation?” which also ran in July was an emphatic “yes.” Being transparent about when you’re receiving compensation to review any product lets readers know about potential biases in the reviews they read.

In early August, I asked: “Is it OK to Google someone you’re about to meet?” While there’s no replacement to getting to know someone in person, it’s also perfectly fine and often wise to gather as much information about a person as you can before meeting them.

Finally, by far the most viewed Right Thing column of the year was June’s “Are you responsible for checking your AI work?” I mentioned that I’d asked several chatbots to write my biography and while most of the information about me was accurate, they also named a wife, children, grandchildren and great grandchildren who didn’t exist in my life, had me living with my imaginary wife in Manhattan for a couple of years, and bestowed a fellowship from a Utah university I’d never received. Even without those hallucinations, the right thing is to double-check whatever AI tells you is true.

As 2025 drew to a close, I was reminded of the opening of a Lucille Clifton poem:

i am running into a new year

and the old years blow black

like a wind

that I catch in my hair

Thank you for continuing to email your questions, stories and reactions to The Right Thing column. May your years continue to be full of doing the right thing while surrounded by those who choose to do the same and may you face whatever the coming year’s winds bring you.

Sunday, January 04, 2026

How likely are you to return a found wallet?

How honest are people likely to be?

In research results published six years ago in the journal Science, researchers wanted to examine the “trade-off between honesty and self-interest” so they “visited 355 cities in 40 countries and turned in a total of 17,303 wallets.”

The wallets contained varying amounts of cash or no cash at all, all in denominations specific to the country where they were "lost." The rate of return was different depending on the country with 76% of people in Switzerland returning a wallet while only 14% did so in China.

But in 38 of the 40 countries, one surprising result was that the more money a wallet contained, the more likely it was returned. If little or no money was in the wallet – the equivalent of $13.45 -- their research found, the rate of return averaged between 40% and 51%. In three countries when they increased the amount in the wallets to the equivalent of $94.14, the rate of return increased to 72%. (Only Mexico and Peru did not experience such a jump, according to the researchers.) That far more people returned wallets when more money was involved surprised the researchers.

I’m reminded of the study whenever I find a wallet on the street, something that seems to happen more than I might have anticipated. Then again, I am old and walk around a lot. Most recently, it happened when I saw a wallet on the stoop of a building in Porto, Portugal, not far from the University of Porto, the university upon which J.K. Rowling allegedly based the gowns worn by the students at Hogwarts.

My Portuguese is nonexistent, so I asked the desk clerk at my hotel for help in figuring out if an owner could be identified. There were 10 euros and a college identification card in the wallet. “Ten euros would mean a lot to the student,” the desk clerk said and he assured me he would turn it in to the police.

While there was no phone number in the wallet, perhaps I should have tried to hunt the student down myself to make sure his cash and cards were returned. Instead, I counted on the fact that Portugal was in the top half of the countries when it came to returning lost wallets with little or no money inside. I also counted on the honesty of the desk clerk.

The lost-wallet study reminded me that generally people try to do the right thing when it comes to being honest about such things as lost wallets, at least the 17,303 that these researchers put into the world.

But I’m curious about what readers have done when in such situations. Nothing? Make every effort to find the owner? Has it depended on how much was in the wallet? If so, what amount triggers action?

Send me your stories to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. I’ll share some in an upcoming column. If you’re worried about others learning of your honest response, I will do my best to disguise your real name.

Sunday, December 28, 2025

Is buying local rather than online more righteous?

Should you feel righteous about buying something from a local store rather than from an online company?

A reader we’re calling Samuel wrote that he experienced two related incidents that left him wondering: “Did I do the right thing?"

About eight years ago after he moved into a new house, he was looking for a chandelier for his dining room. He searched online and found one that looked great. “It was a bit of a splurge,” he wrote, so he wanted to see it in person before he committed to it.

Samuel found a store in his area that carried products from the chandelier company. He took a look at it, liked it and decided to buy it.

Samuel would not have known about the lamp had he not found it online, but he likes to support small businesses like his local lighting store. He left the store. About a block away thought "Hmm, I should buy it from them" and turned around, went back to the store and bought the lamp, paying a bit more than he would have paid online.

The second incident involved booking a hotel for a few days in a foreign city. After searching a big travel website, Samuel found a hotel that looked good but decided to take a look at the hotel’s own website. He figured if he booked directly with the hotel they wouldn’t have to pay the travel website a fee. But he wouldn’t have discovered the hotel had he not found it on the “large and impersonal” travel website. Ultimately, Samuel decided to book directly with the hotel even though there was no financial benefit to doing so, not even a free breakfast.

In each case, Samuel wrote that he shunned the online purchase because “it feels right” to do that. But now he wonders if it was any more right to purchase the chandelier or to book the hotel room from independent proprietors than from the online site where he found these things in the first place.

I’m a big fan of supporting small, independently owned businesses. The woman I’d eat bees for and I make a habit of buying at least one book from an independent bookstore in any town we visit. We’re friendly with the owners of small shops and markets where we live and we try to shop from them regularly.

Samuel could have decided that if something went wrong with the chandelier he’d be more likely to get better service from a local proprietor he knew. He also might have decided if something went awry with his hotel booking, it might be easier to deal with the hotel directly rather than the large travel site.

But those weren’t the reasons for Samuel’s choices. He was kind to give the lighting store and the hotel his business. He pointed out that the owner of the lighting store expressed his gratitude when he learned Samuel had first discovered the chandelier online but decided to buy local instead.

But there would have been nothing wrong if Samuel had decided to buy or book online from larger entities if that worked better for him. Ultimately, the right thing was for Samuel to make the purchases that worked best for him, whatever his reasoning was, even if it was to show a little kindness to independent business owners.

Sunday, December 21, 2025

Alert others when emails go awry

What’s the right thing to do when you receive an email that clearly wasn’t meant for you?

It can be a frustrating and sometimes embarrassing scenario when you inadvertently copy someone on an email by accident. Perhaps you were looking up the person’s email address by clicking on the “to” field in your email so you could forward the address onto the intended recipient. You had no intention of sending the email itself to the person whose address you looked up, but things happen. You get distracted. You forget you’d looked it up and autofill provided the answer. And boom, the email is sent.

It's also not unheard of to compose an email to a group of people but find that autofill provides you with the email address for someone with the same first name as one of the people on your group list rather than the person you really wanted to send your email to. You get distracted. You forget to double-check to make sure the right people are on your email routing list. And boom, the email is sent.

In the case of the former, where you inadvertently copy someone on an email that wasn’t intended for them, a simple apology would be in order if you catch your error. Ideally, your truly intended recipients will fight the temptation to hit “reply all” to your initial email and spare the unintended recipient’s inbox. While it might seem odd to send an apology for sending an unintended note and thus furthering the cluttering of unwanted emails, go with the simple apology and move on.

When you receive an email from someone you know that includes you on a group email list that she clearly didn’t intend for you to be on, the temptation might be to simply ignore the errant email. It wasn’t intended for you and it wasn’t your mistake. But whoever it was who might have been the intended recipient won’t get that initial email. Sure, the group might figure out after a while that this fellow with whom your email address was swapped out wasn’t on the initial email thread. But by then, there might be a lot of catching up to do and more work created to do so. Again, not your mistake. It’s not like doing nothing is going to cause any more work for you.

Nevertheless, the right thing would be to send a reply to the initial sender – not the whole group on the email recipient list – and alert her that you were likely sent the email in error. [12/30/25 NOTE: Dr. Bob Harbort, professor emeritus of computer science at Kennesaw State University, points out that forwarding the initial email rather than hitting reply to just to original sender is the right thing to do here to avoid inadvertently exposing the emails of all the original recipients is the better route to take. See his far more articulate explanation of why in his posted comment below.] Fight any urge to say nothing in a prurient effort to see if you can learn some juicy secrets you weren’t intended to receive. While the sender might be a bit embarrassed at hearing from you, the right thing would be for her to thank you. Then she should figure out how to bring the guy for whom the email actually was intended up to speed.

All of us would do wise to slow down just a tad, take a deep breath and double-check our emails before we send them off. The time we save from having to deal with errant emails will more than make up for the few seconds it takes to check twice before sending.

Sunday, December 14, 2025

Can I use a friend’s discount to get a break on an item?

Is it wrong to use someone else’s discounts on items?

Several weeks ago, on Veterans Day, my grandson gave me a call to let me know that he had just received a free breakfast made available to all active military members. Later that day, he thought he’d check in at the restaurant that was offering 10 free boneless chicken wings to any veteran or active-duty military personnel with a valid ID who dined in. Military.com published a long list of restaurants that were offering discounts or free stuff to military members on Veterans Day. As voracious an appetite as my grandson sometimes has, it was unlikely even he would be able to avail himself of all the wares being offered.

The Baseball Hall of Fame doesn’t limit its military discount to Veterans Day. The woman I’d eat bees for and I were pleasantly surprised when we took him to Cooperstown several years ago and learned that as an active member of the Army, his admission was free. There are a number of other places that offer discounts to anyone with a valid military ID.

It would never cross our minds to ask our grandson to try to use his military discount for us. He could, I suppose, have some of those 10 boneless wings wrapped up to take home and offer some to us. But going in with the intention of doing so would not honor the terms of the discount being offered. Besides, it’s highly unlikely there would be any leftovers.

Buying gifts for others with his discount might be fine as long as the offer didn’t specify any purchases must be for personal use. In some cases, such as USO centers that are set up for active military personnel use, he is permitted to bring his spouse and child if they are with him. In each of these cases, the rules of the discount are what drives how to properly use them.

It's not the same with other discounts being offered to various groups. If I, for example, use my AARP card to get a discount on airline tickets or a hotel room for me as well as other members of my family who are not AARP members, that’s fair game since AARP places no restrictions on using any benefits for family members. Similarly, if I’m a member of a Costco warehouse club, I can bring a nonmember in with me. They can choose items to purchase, but they have to be paid for by an active member.

At the university where I work, there’s an online website that is full of discounts for tickets to sporting events, museums, theater, ballet and other cultural activities. To get to the site, you have to have an active employee ID. But once there, there’s no restriction on whom you’re buying any tickets for.

The answer to whether you can use someone else’s discount to purchase items is that it depends. You should never try to pretend you’re someone you’re not or a member or a group you’re not to get a discount. But if there are no prohibitions on how a discount can be used, there’s nothing wrong with taking advantage of the offer.

As tempting as it might be to skirt the restrictions for getting the discount, the right thing is to always follow the rules.

Sunday, December 07, 2025

Does adding errors make your ChatGPT work seem authentic?

Is it OK to introduce errors into an essay written by ChatGPT to make it appear to be more authentic?

In May, James D. Walsh wrote an article for New York magazine about how college students are using ChatGPT to cheat their way through college. Walsh mentioned one of the way students can attempt to evade detection is by adding typos to essays generated by an AI chatbot.

Some AI experts recommend introducing a minor error or two to the output to give your work more of a sense of “authenticity.”

I was reminded of the old saying attributed to everyone from New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons to comedian Groucho Marx. The late journalist Daniel Schorr recounted a version that involved advice given him before he moved from print journalism to join Edward Murrow for a broadcasting career. “Sincerity,” a producer apparently told him. “If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

While the origin of the sentiment remains unknown, the underlying cynicism seems relevant when it comes to authenticity. Just as there is nothing sincere about faking sincerity, there is nothing authentic about doctoring work produced by generative AI chatbots to make it appear you produced the work yourself.

Doctoring AI output to make it less detectable may be clever. It may help avoid getting caught breaking the rules. But it is hardly authentic.

That still raises the question, however, of whether it is OK to do so. It may be OK in some situations, but being dishonest about using it is not.

If you’re a student in a course and the instructor has laid out specific instructions on the course syllabus or if there is a university code against using AI to generate your work for you, then it is not OK to use it. If a syllabus sets out the rules, then trying to evade detection by using AI and introducing a few minor errors suggest the student knows he or she is breaking those rules. It’s also dishonest to present work created by you without disclosing that may not be the case. If a professor makes clear that he or she won’t use AI either, the right thing is to adhere to that commitment.

If the rules aren’t laid out, the right thing is for instructors to make clear what their expectations are. Many syllabuses contain a sentence or two about plagiarism. It might be wise to consider adding similar language about AI use. When in doubt, a student should always ask a professor if what he or she plans to do is OK.

Increasingly, outside of the classroom, AI has been seen as a useful tool when making presentations, creating resumes, writing cogent emails and completing what might be considered mundane tasks. But anyone using AI would be wise to check whatever product AI gives them before releasing it to the world. Even if you don’t create the work, the right thing is to make sure that it reflects whatever message you want it to get across.

Relying on AI can be OK, but doctoring its output to come across as more authentic is not. Go ahead and ask ChatGPT its opinion. It will tell you that it’s not OK, can backfire and that artificial typos feel artificial. At least that’s what it told me when I just asked it.