MSNBC is scheduled to air another installment of The Ethical Edge this Sunday at 9pm EST (Hurricane Wilma permitting) Quoting this item by the AP’s Frazier Moore in the Jackson Hole Star Tribune…

Do the right thing? What is the right thing? MSNBC helps come up with some answers on “The Ethical Edge: Everyday Ethics,” a one-hour special airing Sunday night. “Miss Manners” columnist Judith Martin joins MSNBC’s Chris Jansing, along with panelists the Rev. Thomas Williams, Rabbi Edward Cohn and professor Anita Allen. Questions include: Is it acceptable to tell a “white lie” by telling a date you’ll call them when you know you won’t? Is it OK to gossip? Should you take the unused shampoo bottles in a hotel? It couldn’t be wrong to watch this show.

And this is from MSNBC’s official release…

Judith Martin shares some surprising views and helps examine the difference between etiquette and ethics. Martin explains that ethics and etiquette are “related” but they are not the same. She says, “Ethics come out of morals, and etiquette comes out of manners, and manners have a moral base in that we all want to be able to get along in communities so we have to restrain ourselves… etiquette is a particular code of the way we do this.” The panel also reviews some hidden camera experiments and how hundreds of daily decisions we make help to shape our ethical character.

Dorothy Rabinowitz in today’s Wall Street Journal (sub req.) writes that MSNBC “…offers an unusually engaging panel, as television panels go.”

Concentrate on the panelists, who are both serious and amusing, not least Miss Manners, who explains the difference between ethics and etiquette, and who, along the way; lowers the boom on people who expect their wedding guests to buy presents as dictated in the bridal registry.

(Note: this entry replaces today’s earlier entry)