In discussions about public trust in science, one often hears calls for more direct engagement between scientists and citizens. Such engagements, however, bring their own ethical challenges. One is how scientists can avoid overstepping the boundaries of their expertise (“epistemic trespassing”), another is the challenge of individual scientists coming to play a role as spokespeople for “science”, or a particular field of science, and thereby almost by necessity drawing on the academic work of others, without always being able to acknowledge it appropriately. These problems are intertwined with another form of “trespassing”: the ethical intricacies of trespassing into sources of authority other than the authority of the scientific expert, e.g. charismatic or traditional authority understood in a Weberian sense. I suggest that solutions to these problems need to be context sensitive, but that at least in some cases, the most ethical thing for individual scientists is to not communicate directly with the public, but rather to see this as a team task to which they should contribute indirectly.