Must the Captain Go Down With His Ship?

Posted by Zara Macadam on January 12, 2012. - No Comments

Italian cruise-ship Captain Francesco Schettino is in jail, following an incident that left 6 dead and 29 missing. Among the accusations levied against is that he fled the foundering vessel before it was empty.

Legal requirements aside, is there an ethical obligation for a captain to risk life and limb to stay on board until the last passenger and crewmembers are off? The answer is pretty clearly yes. Like many jobs, the job of captaining a ship comes with a range of risks and benefits. As long as the risks were understood when the job was taken on, youre obligated to follow through.

Theres a more general point to be made here about the nature of ethics, and about ethics education and training.

Ethics often requires of us actions that wed rather not carry out. You should tell the truth, even when it would be more convenient not to. You should keep your promises, even when breaking them would be more profitable. This is necessarily the case: if ethics only ever required you to do things you already wanted to do, thered be no need for ethical rules .

But theres at least a superficial tension, here, with the idea that ethics should be useful. After all, if having and following an ethical code doesnt benefit us in some way, why bother? Sure, its easy enough to say The right thing to do is the right thing to do, but a system of ethics needs some justification in terms of human well-being or its just not going to be very credible, not to mention stable. Indeed, some ethical systems are subject to serious criticism precisely because their implications for human well-being are negative. Yes yes, I understand that your code of honour requires you to kill the man who killed your brother, but dont you see how crazy this all is?

So theres got to be some connection between ethics and benefit. And its not enough to point to social benefit. After all, pointing out that the community benefits from me taking ethics seriously merely pushes the question of justification to a second level: why should I care about the good of the community, especially if doing so requires significant self-sacrifice?

None of this should engender skepticism or cynicism. It just means we need to think carefully about who benefits, and how, from a system of ethics.

It also means that we need to think about how we can help individuals keep the promises that it was in their interest, initially to make. Captain Schettino found it in his interest to make certain promises when he signed on to be captain of the Costa Concordia, but then all of a sudden found himself in a situation where it was not in his interest to keep that promise. Threats of punishment were understandably insufficient, here. Staying out of jail is no great incentive if youre free-but-dead.

Organizations of all kinds — including especially corporations and professional associations — need to work hard to help members think of the relevant ethical rules as something more than the terms of a contract, to help members become the sorts of people who simply would never abandon ship when they are needed most.

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