My comment is very clearly in response to the OP's questioning:
>"are BCG, Bain, the consulting arms of the Big 4 any more ethical in what they will or won't do for a paying client?"
This is literally asking "what about the other big 4 consulting companies?" There is nothing "misplaced" about my usage of the term here.
The article is about a lawsuit in which a specific company - Mckinsey is named as a defendant which I also stated. So clearly I have actually provided a reason for my assertion.
Lastly disproportionality of media coverage - of which the OP's does not provide any evidence of, does not make the lawsuit any less credible.
I think you’ve totally missed the definition of “whataboutism”. When questioning the ethics of a specific firm in an industry, it’s relevant if they are behaving exactly the same as everyone else in the same industry.
“Perdue chickens are kept in cages!” is flimsy journalism if every large scale chicken farm also keeps their chicken in cages, and the article fails to explain why Perdue is being singled out.
Reporting on air pollution by cars and how it’s changed over the years, and responding that coal power also pollutes, is whataboutism because there’s no expectation of why the pollution level of one would be relevant to the other.
Singling out BMW and talking about how much pollution those specific cars produce because they are more likely to be driven by white collar workers, without explaining if those cars are actually producing more pollution per mile, it would not be “whataboutism” to question - what about the pollution from other brands? Is BMW actually worse or do the people who drive them just make a juicy target?
>"I think you’ve totally missed the definition of “whataboutism”."
Not at all. Whataboutism is a variation on "tu quoque", the idea being an attempt to establish an equivalence between two disparate actions. The disparate actions here being McKinsey's active role in the opioid epidemic - the focal point of this article and the consulting industry's questionable moral compass. PWC, Deloitte and KPMG are not "also" pushing opiods.
They are consulting on other projects that are equally shitty and immoral, whether it be how to structure some financial instrument to screw someone over, or how to implement software to variably price some product based on protected factors, or how to price pharmaceuticals to maximize subscriber copays, or how to design a product with better obsolescence, etc. etc. etc.
Saying that McKinsey is uniquely shitty is perhaps a case study in missing the forest for the tree.
If they could be found criminally liable for all these things that they help their customers
>"are BCG, Bain, the consulting arms of the Big 4 any more ethical in what they will or won't do for a paying client?"
This is literally asking "what about the other big 4 consulting companies?" There is nothing "misplaced" about my usage of the term here.
The article is about a lawsuit in which a specific company - Mckinsey is named as a defendant which I also stated. So clearly I have actually provided a reason for my assertion.
Lastly disproportionality of media coverage - of which the OP's does not provide any evidence of, does not make the lawsuit any less credible.