Thanks for all the replies and insights, I really appreciate you all sharing your experiences with this! All of that totally makes sense.
I can see how there is a lot of grey area around the products of certain industries. I guess if company A and company B were getting blenders designed that had a different target markets, maybe a smaller health and sport on the go blender vs. a powerful snow cone/tropical drinks blender there would be less of a grey area within ethical conflict. Please correct me if I’m wrong but, I guess what it comes down to is, are you designing two products that compete for the same customer 's business, and if so there is conflict.