Welcome to this week’s ethics minute. Today’s dilemma comes from a New York Times reader who walked away from a house sale after discovering on a public registry that a neighbor was a registered sex offender. The sales contract explicitly said neither seller nor agent had to disclose that kind of information, so they may not even have known. Our question: now that you know, should you tell others?

Sex-offender registries were designed to let families take, in official language, “common-sense measures” for protection. But over time they’ve become a system of prolonged public punishment, lumping together everything from predatory acts to teenage mischief. As the Ethicist notes, the registry label tells you almost nothing about actual risk: what happened, how long ago, the person’s age or rehabilitation.

So it’s not unfair that sellers kept mum, and you were free to act on the public data. Others can do the same research. Before you spread the word, ask yourself: what does the simple presence of a name really tell you about safety?
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