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Can confirm this. The concept is not as weird as it sounds once you consider that the ship's captain is a naval officer who has duties and a social role roughly
by algorias 6y ago
Can confirm this. The concept is not as weird as it sounds once you consider that the ship's captain is a naval officer who has duties and a social role roughly similar to that of a doctor. For any task related to navigating/operating the vessel (emergency or not), the captain's word is final and there are penalties for negligent behavior that are determined completely outside of the "corporate" chain of command. Decisions of whether or not to ditch a block of unstable containers are made with 0 interference from commercial interests.
The captain is also the one responsible for upholding the laws of whatever flag the vessel flies under.
- eru 6y ago> Decisions of whether or not to ditch a block of unstable containers are made with 0 interference from commercial interests. Or rather, the commercial interest operates in the long run and influences the mechanisms through which decisions are made. The concepts of eg general average or making the captain's word final were developed very much in correspondence to commercial necessity. In some sense your analogy to a doctor is apt. Individual medical decisions might not look much at costs, but the system as a whole ignores costs at its own peril.