The Right to Remain Silent While applying for a new job, I may need to state whether I have ever been arrested. I was arrested a few years ago for leaving the scene of a fender bender. I strenuously argued my innocence, and the charges were dropped and even erased - so I have been arrested but never charged with a crime. I am comfortable explaining the situation, but do I have an ethical duty to disclose this information on the application? If there's no opportunity to explain the circumstances, your prospective employer is asking a poor question. It's certain to generate dilemmas like the one you describe. It also raises questions about what information qualifies as essential to a prospective employer and what is nonessential information that the employer has the right to know. Would an applicant with a criminal driving record need to disclose this while applying for a telemarketing job? Does a 40-year-old woman need to inform her employer that she was arrested for a minor-in-possession during high school? You, however, are not in a position to question the merits of this query. You have to deal with the situation in front of you, even if it's unfair. This is not a subjective matter: if you want a job, you need to accept its prerequisites. Lying about this arrest is not that different from lying about graduating from a university you barely attended (it's less meaningful, but no less deceptive). Considering the circumstances, it should not be that difficult to explain what happened. If you're not given an opportunity to do so, I can understand the temptation to lie. But you're asking about ethics, so that's my answer. I sent my wife an angry e-mail. An hour or two after sending it, I was working at our shared computer and saw my e-mail, unread, in her in-box. Feeling regretful, I deleted it. Was this unethical? This is a situation in which our current relationship with a specific technology obfuscates the essence of the problem: who owns information, and when does that ownership start? Let's say you dropped a physical letter in the mailbox, walked up the block and suddenly regretted the decision to send whatever was in the envelope. Reaching into a public mailbox to retrieve that letter is unlawful (and complicated). But if the only letter you want to grab is the one you deposited, would the impulse be immoral? What if you regretted the decision not because of what the letter contained but because you realized it was incorrectly addressed? And what if the mailbox wasn't public? What if it was the private mailbox in front of your suburban home (but you've already raised the box's flag, signaling to the postal employee that the letter is now available to be delivered)? It's difficult to definitively declare when a physical letter no longer belongs to the person who wrote it. It could be argued that the moment a letter is placed inside an envelope and the recipient's name is scrawled on the outside, the contents become the recipient's property. But this, somehow, feels incomplete; you could hold onto an addressed, stamped envelope for years, and no one could stop you. What makes e-mail different is that this philosophical haze is technologically eliminated by the lack of a middleman: the moment a user hits the "send" button, the question of ownership is moot. But that shouldn't dictate the ethics. The reason I would classify what you did as unethical is that you shouldn't be directly accessing your wife's e-mail account. The fact that you saw this unread e-mail was possibly unavoidable, as that's always a risk with a shared computer. But you should not manipulate or examine the contents of her in-box, regardless of where those contents are from (there are theoretical exceptions to this rule, but they're so rare that they can almost be disregarded from the discussion - if your wife was missing, for example). I will, however, say this: had you remotely deleted your own unread e-mail after it was sent, I would not classify the act as unethical. If someone wrote an ill-advised e-mail in haste (or inadvertently sends a message to 100 co-workers instead of one) and used an "unsend" feature to destroy it before it could be opened, I would support the act (although it should be noted that the current technology for doing so isn't very practical - not everyone has it, and my e-mail system only allows for a 30-second annihilation window). Now, I realize this presents a logical contradiction. As the writer of the e-mail to your wife, you could claim you're being reprimanded for manually doing something that would somehow be acceptable if it were done remotely, even though the outcome is identical. The difference, however, is this: the first situation involves rooting through someone's nonphysical mailbox, which we've collectively agreed is off limits. The second situation involves pre-emptively extracting something that - in my view - is still partly your property. That distinction is minuscule and certainly debatable. But that's what makes this a good question.