Office Detectives - NYTimes.com At my office, we were feeling a nagging concern about a candidate we were strongly considering for a position. So we decided to call someone at a company the person had listed on the résumé but had not provided a reference for. Wow, did we get earful on the person (not in a good way)! But then we weren't sure if it was ethical to use this information in assessing the person. Of course, it was awfully hard to forget. We ultimately didn't hire the person. Shrewd folks ask their references if they plan on saying good things about them, and ethical people answer them honestly. And so references are invariably good. So how does a potential employer learn about a person's shortcomings? Employers should dig into an applicant's work history to try to assess his potential fit. This means that it is perfectly acceptable to call a former employer not listed as a reference. The alternative to your thorough information-gathering is potentially hiring the wrong candidate, which is bad, not just for your office but also for the better candidate you would have hired had you done your homework. Another alternative to the hard work of assessing an unknown candidate is to rely on personal recommendations from your friends or co-workers, but that shortcut discriminates against folks who aren't fortunate enough to have well-connected friends. But did you discuss the bad reference with the candidate? He (or she) deserved a chance to respond, and you should have asked him in the interview what didn't work out in his previous position, what he learned from it and how those lessons would translate into better performance in the job you were filling. If you didn't give the candidate a chance to talk candidly about his experience, then I think you failed both your company and the candidate. Otherwise, congratulations on avoiding a potentially disastrous hire. And I'm sure that the person you did hire is grateful for your intense vetting of the candidates. We are planning a trip to Orlando to take my son to Disney World for Memorial Day weekend. Everything was booked, and then the Trayvon Martin case happened. We are quite angry at the murder of this child, the Stand Your Ground law and the deliberate negligence of the Florida authorities. Are we obligated to cancel our trip? Our son very much wants to go, but even if we lose a lot of money, I feel that ethically we shouldn't be spending our tourist dollars in Florida. Voting with your dollars is powerful, so your desire to curtail your spending in Florida, given your beliefs, makes a lot of sense. But have your dollars already voted? If the trip is prepaid and nonrefundable, then staying home won't register as any kind of protest, and you will succeed only in hurting your family. Instead, go on the trip, pack peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches - so no more of your dollars are spent in Florida - and stay at the park from dawn to dusk to really get your money's worth. But be careful sharing your amazing vacation photos with friends, lest you inadvertently encourage them to spend their tourist dollars in Florida. My mom and I argue whenever we head to the mall or go grocery shopping. I think it's fine to duck into Sephora and try on some makeup, even though it is out of my price range. Similarly, it's fine to grab a free sample at Trader Joe's or a food store, even if I have no intention of buying it. My mom happily takes free samples, but won't try on makeup with me. Is there a difference? Is either ethical? Both Trader Joe's and Sephora provide free samples to entice people who don't yet know that they want to buy the item they are sampling. Your mom may be worried that if you never plan to buy the sampled product at Sephora, then you are not its intended audience. That logic also would apply to samples at Trader Joe's. What probably doesn't occur to her is that you also are not the target audience if you definitely are going to buy the product before you sample it. In both cases, taking the sample is ethical. Even though you may be quite confident that you will never buy a product from Sephora, we are all notoriously bad at predicting what our future selves will do. The store's bet is that it is offering such a transformative product that, after trying it, you will be willing to make a sacrifice, like giving up coffee for a month, to afford it. Why should your mom deny Sephora the chance to persuade you or her? Betsey Stevenson, the Ethicist this week, is a visiting assistant professor of economics at Princeton University.