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One guidance for the ethical side are the guidelines agreed upon by professional associations. I can't think of any that condone copyright infringement.

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I disagree that that is a good source of guidance. Even if we take that as a given, OF COURSE few organizations promote breaking the law (sometimes a crime it self).

Although, many, many push to change the law / restrictions put on scientific research. I can't spend time to google and list all the references. start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science#Projects_promotin...

Another guidance for the ethical side is the concrete behaviour of working scientists: If they would send you the paper if you asked them by email, this is a clear statement that copyright violation is perfectly okay.

At least in my discipline, authors either retain copyright to their manuscript and can disseminate that freely, or they are able to personally disseminate the final published article (sometimes including on their own website). No copyright transgression occurs in this case.

Way back in the day, we would buy reprints from the journal, and then mail them to requesters. And then Xerox machines appeared, and we made our own copies. Now we just email PDFs.

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