I’m finally watching the acclaimed AMC series “Mad Men.” I’m impressed: the character development is deft and complex, the evocation of the Fifties and early Sixties is fairer and more accurate than it usually is, and the ethical issues explored are many and complex.

At the end of season five the series presented as good an example as you will find of how motives behind conduct usually don’t change the analysis of whether the conduct was ethical or not. Series anti-hero Don Draper, a talented advertising innovator, finds the Madison Avenue firm where he’s a partner facing ruin because its biggest client, Lucky Strike cigarettes, has defected to a bigger agency. Now all of his agency’s clients are spooked, and potential clients are waiting to see if it survives.

Impulsively and without consulting his other partners, Draper buys a full page ad in the New York Times, announcing that he, and therefore his firm, is giving up tobacco and cigarettes because they kill people, and marketing such a deadly product is wrong.

Draper doesn’t do this as a matter of conscience. He does it to take control of his firm’s fate, to make it seem like the loss of a large cigarette client was in fact a proactive decision made in the public interest, and by virtue-signaling and grandstanding, to attract new clients impressed by courage and integrity. The ad is, in short, self-serving, desperate, and cynical: ethics have nothing to do with it. Appearing ethical is the point.

Yet that does not change the fact that the public condemnation of smoking was the right thing to do regardless of his motives. The results of the declaration will be the same, whether the reasons behind it were pure or not. Thoughts are not ethical or unethical. Conduct is ethical or unethical.

The complicating factor in the “Mad Men” scenario is that advertising is a Bizarro World culture, like war and politics. It is inherently unethical, so applying traditional standards of right and wrong often don’t make sense, nor are ethical and unethical actions dependably likely to have the same effects they might have in other contexts. Conduct that may have salutary consequences outside of Madison Avenue may be disastrous in the weird world of advertising. Don Draper only cares about whether his shocking public attack on tobacco saves his firm, not how many lives it saves, if any.

Ironically, however, it may do both.

But even if it accomplishes neither, it is still an ethical act.