SOUND OFF: BUTTERING UP THE BOSS

The current movie Julie and Julia recounts the true story of Julie Powell, a blogger who decided to spend a year cooking every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Well into her effort Powell (Amy Adams) runs into a problem: The night before a dinner with an important editor, she sleeps through the timer and her main dish is ruined. The following day she calls in sick to work, in order to remake the meal. At her husband's suggestion, she writes in her blog that she has been laid low by a cold, so as to avoid having her bosses find out the truth from her blog.

Independent of the ethics of calling in sick when you're not sick, which have been thoroughly explored in this column, is it wrong to lie about this sort of thing in a personal blog? Or, because the blog is the writer's personal expression and is read only by those who choose to, can the blogger make up anything he or she likes?

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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.

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