How to Use ethical in a Sentence

ethical

adjective
  • Some doctors feel that this procedure is not medically ethical.
  • How many days of growth are ethical?
    — Theresa Gaffney, STAT, 3 Mar. 2026
  • Build your ethical guardrails from day one.
    — David Henkin, Forbes.com, 2 Sep. 2025
  • There was a deep, ethical thing.
    — Anne Thompson, IndieWire, 14 Oct. 2025
  • Whether that’s ethical or not isn’t the question here.
    — Rachel Wells, Forbes.com, 8 Sep. 2025
  • There also might be ethical concerns due to the use of salmon sperm.
    — Kathleen Ferraro, Verywell Health, 31 Mar. 2025
  • Some brave doula to help the world-to-come through the birth canal and to offer it an ethical path?
    — Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker, 25 Dec. 2025
  • But is the crime here — if there is a crime, in an ethical if not a legal sense — mere hypocrisy?
    — New York Times, 18 Mar. 2022
  • So there are some moral and ethical decisions to be made.
    — Big Think, 10 Nov. 2025
  • Watchdogs say this is one of many reasons the project is an ethical red flag.
    — NPR, 22 Oct. 2025
  • Apart from the science, one of the hurdles has, of course, been ethical.
    — New Atlas, 27 June 2026
  • For her, the stakes are ethical as much as commercial.
    — Christopher McFadden, Interesting Engineering, 21 Feb. 2026
  • In Guerrero, even those who want to be ethical can be forced to forge a truce with the gangs.
    — Los Angeles Times, 30 Dec. 2021
  • What role should language play in ethical medicine today?
    — JSTOR Daily, 11 Oct. 2025
  • Of those three emotions, awe is clearly the most ethical to try to elicit.
    — Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic, 3 Jan. 2026
  • This is hardly the stuff of the more ethical world that Mishra claims to desire.
    — Franklin Foer, The Atlantic, 26 Feb. 2025
  • In the last part of their ethical analysis, Wolfe et al.
    — Torie Bosch, STAT, 7 Feb. 2026
  • So people were already thinking in ways that were more ethical.
    — Washington Post, 14 Apr. 2022
  • What caused this shift in public judgment—indeed, an ethical shift—over the last fifty years?
    — Sam Needleman, The New York Review of Books, 7 Oct. 2023
  • How will pet stores that work with ethical breeders be impacted?
    — Krista Kafer, Denver Post, 27 Mar. 2026
  • If so, the legal and ethical questions will become more salient.
    — Russ Mitchellstaff Writer, Los Angeles Times, 12 Apr. 2022
  • While there’s a journalism code of ethics, sources don’t have the same ethical code to follow.
    — Rick Sobey, Boston Herald, 14 Apr. 2026
  • Shout out to arguably the world’s most ethical — and laziest — robot cop.
    — Frank Landymore, Futurism, 17 June 2026
  • That will be up to the ethical committee to assess.
    — Philip Buckingham, New York Times, 27 Apr. 2026
  • This is not an abstract ethical concern.
    — John Fomeche, STAT, 7 Apr. 2026
  • Is the consumption of true crime ethical?
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 June 2026
  • Perhaps even a kind of ethical restraint.
    — Leonard David, Space.com, 17 Mar. 2026
  • Sales should be ethical and in the buyer’s best interest.
    — Chris John Amorosino, Hartford Courant, 20 June 2026
  • Since then, a new round of ethical questions, and the court’s rulings this term, have increased calls for change.
    — Ann E. Marimow, Washington Post, 25 July 2024
  • The most ethical hotels include any mandatory fees as part of the room rate.
    — Christopher Elliott, USA TODAY, 4 Aug. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ethical.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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