X-Guard Sweep

The best way to bypass ethics is to create an institute for ethics. For any new field of knowledge, why not establish the official facts, principles, arguments, and resolutions that you desire so you can keep doing what you intend? All pragmatic aims will be realized once they are deemed ethically allowed, and companies will happily pay a tithe for the church's holy blessing.

Just as media narratives on topics express only one or two possibilities and favor that which politicians prefer, rather than a broad spectrum of viewpoints and ideas with differing advantages and disadvantages, it's easy to control the answer for any topic if you control the discussion.

A phony institute that sounds official will provide a favorable answer and produce volumes of literature attesting to its unanimous agreement. All academics will be strong-armed to extend allegiance and teach the doctrine while squashing alternatives and calling them wrong since they differ with the official well publicized answers.

It's gamed from the start and soon hires zombies to run the institute, which entails upholding established standards and supporting industry partners. Big systems built to dominate yield no ground, which works well until they are entirely ignored and bypassed, at which point their landgrab to establish control with imaginary standards is realized as a terrible disservice to humanity.