Everything said here does not apply if you're dealing with non-reversible acts of damage. And kids (broadly defined).

Much trouble of the world stems from people wanting other people to be of a certain way.

You dispense advices. "Be more ___," you said. To an alcoholic friend, you may say "come on, drink less."

In doing so, you assert your ways of the living. It makes just a little more confident that you're doing it right. As a bonus, you've also helped another person.

Or so you thought.

Here's an unusual idea: if you're not helping the other person be more of who he is, you're being unethical.

If a person is clearly on a path to being a trash, the right thing to do would be help him be a world-class non-harmful trash.

The wrong move would be to have him change into a barely passable useful upstanding member of society. Even if he succeeds, he would at best be hardly competent at being a non-trash.

For this to make sense, it requires an approach of relativity to character development.

An adult person is on the way of being something until the completion of the phase. He can only get out of the phase by completing it. There's largely no yanking him out of the phase, he will simply drift back into it like a zombie.

The trick is to accelerate the completion of the phase while sustaining the least damage possible.

Therefore the ethical thing to do is to say to him "drink more" until he doesn't feel like it anymore.

We obviously can't stomach public service announcements and religious teachings taking an approach like this (safe for one form of Buddhism I know of). But virtues are general advice done on a macro scale. One single holy book is written for billions; nothing in there can be personalized.

Very few of us live life on a macro scale. Classic wisdom don't know your friends as well as you do; you're obligated to apply some critical thinking on them.

Standard advices are plucked off of scripts. Dispensing them is easy; they make you look virtuous. But they are most probably contextually wrong in ways you don't even know.

Helping people self-actualize on the other is hard. It requires knowing them and the roadmap they are on, which is invisible (especially to themselves).

But what the hell, pick the easy path anyway. You probably can't help it.