301 Redirects & Link Popularity

[smokewagon]

I own and operate a website, let's call it thewidget.com. I've been operating it for a little over a year now.

Last month I acquired one of my competitors sites, let's call it widgets.com, who sells the exact same products I do (essentially, the business/website was sold to me as is). This competitor site did a good job of getting inbound links to the site.

Is it ethical in the eyes of the search engines if I 301 redirect from widgets.com to thewidget.com, in order to benefit from the inbound links from the competitor site?

I apologize if this thread is in the wrong section.

[smokewagon]

Nobody knows if this is ethical?