Followers of this blog know that Ethics and Compliance don't always mean the same thing.  In fact, they can be in stark contrast to each other.  Here's one example:

Part of the court settlement of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico requires compensation for losses incurred within a specified time period . . . even if the loss was not as a result of the spill.  So a farmer who elected not to plant during this time period is going to be compensated for lost revenue, even though his decision was not as a result of the spill.

This is a classic example of compliance, but it is hardly ethical.  A similar example took place in my community after a severe hailstorm.  Home owners filed insurance claims to have their roofs replaced, even though there had been no damage, and the insurance companies paid for these replacements.

We continue to elect lawyers to most public offices, and their training and their profession is grounded in compliance, not in ethics.  It is understandable that they will default to the compliance position, and it is understandable that there will be no shortage of clients who want this kind of representation.  

This reminds me of the old adage:  Just because you have the right to do something doesn't make it the right thing to do.

The disconnect between scientific progress and the inability for humanity to show the same progress in social matters is relevant to any discussion of ethics and appropriate behavior.  There are many different interpretations of this dilemma.   The below statement is an interesting and insightful approach by a classically trained economist.

 “To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm. In the physical sciences there may be little objection to trying to do the impossible; one might even feel that one ought not to discourage the over-confident because their experiments may after all produce some new insights. But in the social field the erroneous belief that the exercise of some power would have beneficial consequences is likely to lead to a new power to coerce other men being conferred on some authority.

Even if such power is not in itself bad, its exercise is likely to impede the functioning of those spontaneous ordering forces by which, without understanding them, man is in fact so largely assisted in the pursuit of his aims. We are only beginning to understand on how subtle a communication system the functioning of an advanced industrial society is based—a communications system which we call the market and which turns out to be a more efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed information than any that man has deliberately designed.

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success," to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society—a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

Friedrich A. Hayek's lecture "The Pretense of Knowledge," delivered upon accepting the Nobel Prize in economics, Dec. 11, 1974.