Are academic ethics global or local? This question is inspired by this recent answer that mentions that whether downloading articles from 'questionable' sites is legal (not ethical) may depend on local law. That is, law is local.

Are academic ethics global or local? Clearly, legal principles and conclusions vary from place to place, but does the same apply to academic ethics, or are academic ethics the same no matter where you go? That is, while there may be (and may continue to be) genuine debates on various ethical matters in academia, do these debates and disagreements apply fully to academics everywhere in the world, or are there "local" ethics?

At first, I figured that getting large numbers of people scattered throughout the world to agree on anything is so remotely implausible that there must be local ethics, but then I realized that I couldn't think of any rational set of circumstances where I would advise a colleague that they could solve their ethical issue not by changing their behavior, but by crossing a border, e.g.,


  Dude, while fooing the bar does not violate any specific statute in the Civil or Criminal Codes of Florin, it is near-universially considered academically unethical here! Have you considered a transfer to our branch campus in Guilder? You can foo the bar all you like there - they even have a Department of Fooing the Bar and award annual scholarships for the most bars fooed that year. Just take care that Guilderian ethics requires that you disclose your blood type to research subjects before you ask them to fill out a survey - people who don't are not charged in court per se, but their names get published in Guilder's Most Annoying Unethical Jerkfaces Quarterly and are rarely, if ever, allowed to return to academia there.
Your ethics vs the ethics of your community

It may well be that your personal ethics differs from the dominant ethics of the society where you happen to live, the society which is also setting the rules that influence your research.

While for many cases there's more or less a worldwide consensus about what's acceptable and not, there are genuine debates where multiple options are plausible, and in the case of such debates it's feasible that the IRB's of different countries would have contrary opinions.  One such factor where it's obvious why there are differences (and also obvious why some people may not consider the other's arguments as binding or even relevant) is religious influence which has some impact on medical experiments (e.g. stem cell debate or certain aspects of sexuality in some parts of the world), other factors of medicine include things such as research on certain recreational substances and euthanasia. There are also topics (or findings of fact) that are highly unpopular for political reasons, which again are local.

It may well be that the IRB considers a particular type of research unethical and unacceptable (i.e. it wouldn't be minor adjustments to do that thing properly but "your goal is taboo"), it's not a fluke and every IRB around them would consider it unethical, but the researcher, taking all the arguments provided by the IRB into account, still finds that they personally believe this action to be ethical. In such situations, a reasonably valid option would be to move to a location where the locally dominant ethics matches your own - and which would likely not have objections to that research.