From 1999 to 2011, Randy Cohen was “The Ethicist,” the New York Times’ resident moral philosopher. Each week he responded to readers’ letters about ethical conundrums by offering his thinking on the rightness and wrongness of various actions or proposed courses of action. Cohen’s reasoning was usually convincing, his style witty (and sometimes wisecracking), and his advice commonsensical, progressive and humane. Here’s a typical letter from “Be Good,” his new collection of these columns:

“My daughter plays soccer where opportunities are uneven. Some teams have better fa­cilities and coaching and draw on a larger player pool. Weaker teams have difficulty competing and sometimes compensate by adjusting the playing field for home games. They grow the grass extra long or hose down the turf to create mud, neutralizing the superior ball-handling skills of the stronger team’s players. My daughter’s team has encountered such tactics. Are they ethical?”

So how would you respond to this question? Cohen writes in his introduction that “many people told me that they treated ‘The Ethicist’ as a family game played at breakfast each Sunday morning. One family member read the question aloud, then they went around the table and each person answered it. Only after did they read my reply and go on to discuss it. And pay off any side bets.”

An old poem by James Russell Lowell goes, “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, / In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.” In fact, as Cohen shows, most of us are repeatedly faced with small and large questions about how we should behave, what Cohen calls issues of “everyday ethics.” For example, “May you move to high-priced unoccupied seats at a ball game? May you pocket lots of motel soap and donate it to the homeless?” Even modest problems, as Cohen says, reveal much “about power, money, race, class, gender, the mutual obligations and unspoken assumptions that connect — the very things that public policy so often must deal with.”

In this light, consider Cohen’s answer to the soccer field question:

“A certain amount of gamesmanship is okay in any sport, but there are limits, ambiguous but genuine, and your daughter’s ­rivals have transgressed them.

“Here’s one guideline: you ought not manipulate the field of play so as to destroy a fundamental part of the game.”

He goes on to suggest asking the officials to judge whether a team has gone too far in altering the field conditions. But in an update to his original answer, he adds: “Several readers believed that I took too narrow a view of this situation. They’re right. It is insufficient to eval­uate only the onfield response to inequality. . . . The daughter’s team should press the league to become more egalitarian, instituting measures to even up the facilities and coaching among all teams. Indeed, we all should consider this broader question among teams in an amateur soccer league, public schools in neighboring towns, or in the broader inequities that exist throughout America. Ethics concerns not just how we act at a moment of decision but how we respond to the conditions that engendered that moment; ethics demands not just individual rectitude but civic virtue.”