Here is a checklist for you:
1. If you have an ethical code, does action X violate it? How significant is this violation?
2. Is it against the terms of service of something? If so, what is the probability of you getting negatively impacted, and how significant is that negative?
3. What are the benefits you stand to gain.
4. If the benefit is positive, determine the benefit of the best white hat method. Calculate the difference between them. If white hat is better, use it. If black or gray hat is better, determine a standard for yourself.
For instance, assuming I'm a real-life criminal, I could decide to work for $10 helping unload a truck. The annoyance of doing that will make it worth less, but assume it's worth $8 after that. I can also steal from an elderly women who I know always brings $10 to the store. This will give me a value of $12 because I like stealing.
Seems like I should steal if the risk of getting caught is low. However, I'm still choosing to take a method with some risk for $2.00. That isn't worth the risk to me. Since black hat can involve risks, you're essentially "stacking" the deck against yourself. This is why many people favor white hat.
The trick is to keep your black hat organized in the right sort of way. Once you close a project, it shouldn't be able to come back to haunt you. You keep your risk percentage consistently low, and you engage in low-risk (banned accounts causing loss of profit) in exchange for a chance at high profit. This is generally a waste of time, which is why you do it 1000 times, etc.
That's somewhat of an example of how you should analyze things. Psychology and economics seem to suggest we are intrinsically bad at this sort of thing. I only deal with real content marketed in ways intended to bring actual visitors. The way I gain these actual visitors is questionable, but I'm not going to spend 5 hours doing something I can do in 5 minutes just because Google doesn't like it. I suppose they want real content to become popular based on merit, but the rich can already buy real people to market their sites. It's more like someone doesn't want the average person being able to compete with big business. A couple hundred dollars gets you what would otherwise take thousands of paid employees. And something tells me companies are using the same software to cut costs.
I've always been a little off-center when it comes to traditional norms. If something wastes my time, I don't like it. I mean when you live in an ordered society where 99% of people don't steal, I'll criticize the thief. But when 99% of people are stealing, I'll be changing my strategy. Game theory supports bending the rules in many situations. Black hat arguably does the internet a service by strengthening methods of protecting against it. The ideal is to have a complex and advanced system immune to cheats. That's actual one of the reasons lawyers are defending criminals that they know are guilty. If the law can let that person go free, it needs to be shown to fix it - because we all know someone will be more than willing to defend similar people in the future.
