I think it's quite possible in principle to be successful at pickup and seduction, even for beginners, while maintaining regard to ethics. I run a quick expected value calculation on just about anything I do.

The reason it is difficult in practice is because some of the ethical standards applied to men learning conscious seduction are bogus and would not hold up if applied to female mating behavior, or to naturally skilled men who do exactly the same thing unconsciously. Such standards would ban large swathes of human social behavior if applied consistently.

Applying a reasonable moral framework is not much of an impediment to learning and practicing seduction, yet there are certain bloated, anachronistic, non-reality-based, moral frameworks that are. In the extreme, we can see radical feminists John Stoltenberg and Robert Jensen who have come to believe that participating in heterosexual sex is currently unethical because it is so oppressive to women, and turned towards celibacy (Jensen's essay is titled "Patriarchal Sex," but I don't see it available online for free anywhere).