The rise of ChatGPT has sparked significant ethical concerns. Academia worries about issues such as originality and undetectable plagiarism, while ethicists and industry experts highlight problems such as biased outputs, data security, and privacy. Given its broad reach and accessibility and profound impact on productivity and efficiency across academic, workplace, and social contexts, there is a pressing need to examine the factors influencing users’ ethical judgments regarding ChatGPT. This study addresses this gap by exploring the factors influencing ethical judgments in ChatGPT use. Through qualitative inductive research, it captures users’ ethical considerations, analyses them through dominant ethical philosophies, and proposes an emergent theory elucidating ethical considerations of ChatGPT users contextualized within existing ethical theories and philosophies. The findings aim to assist organizations, academia, and policymakers in developing robust ethical guidelines to govern the use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT.