Seems like some sort of fallacy. If an organization doesn’t have an ethics code, then critics can say that the organization needs to hold themselves up to ethical standards, if they do have an ethics code, critics can point out, like you have, that there must be a bunch of ethical violations which created the need for the code.

Yeah well it's kind of like how we have all this financial regulation yet at the same time (allegedly) have widespread financial corruption ...

I think this kind of thinking seems to not be that harmful, but in reality it can lead to the absolute worst justifications and actions in human history, such as:

>The fact that such a law existed at all suggests that someone thought it was necessary. There must've been a fair number of unethical witches/gays/drug users/race of people.

But your example is a law against witches/gays, not a law against _unethical_ witches/gays. I don't think your example is a fair analogy. The first sentence does in fact imply to me that there must've been some number of people thought to be witches/gays/etc

Not necessarily. If you have a large influx of people into a community then it becomes more necessary to codify a community's standards of behavior.

I would guess that it would come from unethical hobos making regular society treat all hobos badly, which would make life more difficult for all hobos.