Is not doing bad good enough?
I got a piece of spam last week that made me chuckle – it was for “ethical” search engine optimisation (SEO).
Ethical? How can SEO be ethical or unethical?
Even a relative luddite like myself knows that in the lingo of the SEO there are ‘white hat’ techniques – ie those which make a page easy for Google to rank, and ‘black hat’ techniques which are devious techniques to try to fool Google.
But the use of “ethical” I found amusing. Not just because of the low stakes context, but the assumption that ethical = not doing bad as opposed to ethical = doing good.
On environmental issues, boasting about ‘not doing bad’ is branded ‘greenwash.’ It is taken as read that to be seen to be green, a company has to go beyond legal compliance, and indeed ‘standard practice’, and start aggressively addressing major environmental issues.
But there doesn’t seem to be the equivalent language for ethical issues – or no polite language anyway. When I asked Twitter what was the phrase for making ‘normal’ sound ‘ethical’, the best (and only) response I got was “I call it bullshit.” Well, yes, but…