No, it is not ethical.
I remember when I was studying philosophy, the law was enacted in Poland which turned into crime 'writing exam essays
for money'. Clearly 'writing exam essays
for free' was not a crime. So maybe help from a friend is ethical.
The another, more important, point is the corruption of university system, a system which originally was designed to promote competence in an independent inquiry.
Essays are intended to make you capable of extended argumentation and thus a worthy member of democracy and other debating societies, like science, or RVF, for example.
But I remember many students in the philosophy department earning decent money with this activity. But guess where was the market? Other philosophy students? NO.
The market, as usually, is in different segment.
The market has been mainly composed from education (pedagogy), political science, and law students.
In Germany there were many plagiat scandals - Hans Theodor von und zu Guttenberg and Annete Schavan, being at the ministerial level, were the most famous ones - and the culprits were almost exclusively lawyers, economists, political scientists, and teachers. Contrary to their self-image of solid and earnest workers, Germans are
die Hochstapler (con-men) not lesser than others. Education studies of all sorts balooned to extreme degree here.
It is very troubling that so many scandals were at the high level of society which rather clearly speaks of contempt and arrogance on the elite level.
Here is the list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific...in_Germany
It simply follows that lawyers, economists, political scientists, and teachers are the biggest corruptors of society. They destroyed the West, and, strangely, only in the West these sciences have any significance, starting with Jan Amos Comenius who designed education like alchemy - with 'grades' of transformation needed to advance forward. The Western paradigm, broadly speaking, is based on the essentially heretic, alchemic idea of turning something into something else, namely upon the idea of mutiny against natural order. But nowadays, the Western alchemic society is coming to the final recognition - that education is not a philospher's stone and it is not possible to turn everything into gold.
After the Fall of the West, a history of the West should be written under the title
'The Rise and Decline of the Western alchemic society'