Wrong by the rules of right and wrong that a job or a group agrees on. This is the key thing: unethical is usually about professional or public standards, not about breaking the law and not about hurting someone's feelings. A doctor who tells a stranger about your illness, a researcher who changes his numbers, a company that hides what its product does — all unethical. Notice that none of those are necessarily crimes. That gap is exactly where the word does its work: "it wasn't illegal, but it was unethical" is one of the most common sentences it appears in. It is a serious, rather formal accusation, at home in business, medicine, journalism, science and politics. For everyday personal badness — lying to a friend, being unkind — English speakers reach for wrong, mean, or not right instead. And it is worth saying that people argue about it a lot, because who decides? What one company calls smart marketing, others call unethical. The word points at a standard, and standards are the thing people disagree over.