Q: Natural-gas companies in our area can drill in one spot and extract gas more than a mile away by using “horizontal” drilling. These companies offered to lease homeowners’ mineral rights — about $4,000 for my partner and me. For environmental reasons, we strongly oppose this drilling, but most of our neighbors are enthusiastic about the profits, so drilling will likely be done under our house whether or not we agree to the lease. What should we do? — Jessica May, Fort Worth, Texas
A: It is understandable that you feel powerless in the face of communitywide sentiment — gold rush! — but you should not sign the lease. To fail to resist what you see as injustice simply because you fear that you cannot win the fight assures the very defeat you dread.
If nothing else, this is a short-term view. Political struggle is long. Even if you lose the first battle, you fight on, and by resisting from the outset, you shape the conditions of that struggle.
I reject your premise that drilling is inevitable no matter what you — and by extension, your neighbors — do. (Local environmental groups might suggest effective actions that you have not considered.) If the gas companies believed that, they wouldn’t continue to offer the money to all and sundry.
But the most potent argument for declining to sign what you regard as a devil’s bargain is this: It violates your own principles.
Q: A dear friend was facing some difficult times, including an increasingly strained marriage. I went to visit him for a few days to provide some support. One evening, while he was away, his wife seemed to make sexual advances to me: Nothing explicit, but I felt uneasy. Do I alert him to her inappropriate advances? — Name Withheld, New Jersey
A: Keep it to yourself. The wife’s actions are too ambiguous, too anomalous and too easily denied by her for you to provoke a confrontation in an already shaky marriage. Furthermore, if you had responded to her putative pass, who knows whether she would have followed through or backed off? Even if she explicitly propositioned you on that one occasion, that, too, would belong in your file of silence. Everyone does foolish things from time to time, particularly when under stress. Such things are often best overlooked. (There’s a phrase for it in German: Einmal ist keinmal. Loosely: Once does not count.)
Update: He said nothing. The couple have gone into counseling and are, he says, “making progress.”
Write Randy Cohen at Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111, or ethicist@nytimes.com.
