Can the English–Arabic subtitles of stand-up comedies on Netflix be ethically evaluated?

Recent research on English–Arabic subtitling of stand-up comedy on Netflix has documented extensive use of euphemization, omission, and cultural adaptation to render humour accessible to Arabic-speaking audiences. While such strategies are often framed as culturally sensitive or audience-oriented, their ethical status remains largely under-theorized. Drawing on major ethical paradigms in translation studies — deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and activist ethics — this paper argues that ethical evaluation of Netflix’s stand-up comedy English–Arabic subtitles is theoretically possible only within specific ethical frameworks, yet impossible to establish conclusively across them. Practices praised as culturally considerate under utilitarian or narrative ethics may be condemned from deontological or foreignizing perspectives, while Netflix’s perceived inconsistency as a transnational actor may itself be interpreted as ethically defensible under certain frameworks. The paper thus concludes that no universal ethical judgment of English–Arabic Netflix subtitles can be sustained, highlighting the inherently plural, contested, and framework-dependent nature of ethics in translation, with implications for Audiovisual Translation (AVT) research, platform studies, and translation ethics scholarship.