Ethics: refer to a set of principles and guidelines that are established by a community, organization, or society to promote responsible and respectful behavior.
Law reflects the ethics of the populace, not the other way around.
"Ethical" is a social construct that's time-bound based upon the beliefs and actions of the people.
Slavery was ethical, for the population of slavers. The holocaust was ethical, based upon the beliefs of Nazis.
"Ethics" isn't a guideline, it's a benchmark.
History is written by the winners and we are all a product of our environment, including our time. If we were born 200 years ago in the US South, we'd be perfectly fine with slavery.
That doesn't make it right, we have a different perspective here in the present, where we understand (or at least understood) basic human rights, and that black people are, indeed, human.
Well, you and the meme creator need to look up how the definitions of "ethics" and "morality" differ. Although the definition of "ethics" that you quoted is already a good start.
That is exactly the type of confidently expressed non-sense that people who (intentionally or not) ignore how the concepts of ethics and morality differ.
Abolitionists were a growing minority. Lincoln didn't just wake up one day and free the slaves...but we are still 18 years away from the 200 year anniversary of the emancipation proclamation.
But society (US society) as a whole accepted slavery as a fact of life.
Just like we accept suicide nets, sweat factories, "inmate labor", ,Uighur camps, and North Korean "mercenaries" as facts of life today. We don't want them, we just choose to forget they exist. Through our collective inaction, we passively condone them.
Plenty of individuals oppose them enough to actively avoid supporting them in any way, but they are such an inconsiderable minority of consumers, in the eyes of the corporate lords.