You're repeating the article's position, while presenting as heartily disagreeing with it, and presenting that its position is "companies alone should decide ethics"
That is a valid criticism. My tone was a bit combative even though I am largely supporting the article's conclusions. What I was targeting though was the idea of an ethical duty by the lawyers or the company. The title, 'Meta's Legal Team Abandoned Its Ethical Duties' makes it clear what their central idea is even though they discuss actions later that my position, and theirs, would both agree should happen. I think this concept, that they had an ethical duty, is a core issue and leads to the position we are in. As the article points out, there was a change in the ethics of big lawyers that have led to companies like Meta considering it possible to take these tactics. The very idea that lawyers and companies can and should be ethical implies that everyone's ethics are the same which is obviously false and leads to justifications in boardrooms that should instead be clear-cut discussions of legality from the start. If we argue that meta's lawyers should be held accountable for ethics violations and not legal ones then we are stepping on very unsteady ground since they can, rightfully, say that they are on sound ethical ground supporting their client to the fullest. How could you prosecute them for that? If anything you should prosecute them if they didn't use every dirty trick in the book based on an ethical argument. We need a legal argument, not an ethical one which is, hopefully, what I made clear in my comments.
