Absolute rules guarantee collective trust where case-by-case judgment cannot

Evidence

The rule has been made that a captain must be the last to abandon his vessel in a shipwreck; that he must leave only when everybody else on board is safe. Some have even gone so far as to claim that in such cases the captain ‘must’ go down with his ship. Such assertions are less irrational than it might seem. Certainly, there may be certain cases in which there is no reason why the captain should not save himself first. But if such cases were made the basis for a rule, what guarantee would there be that a captain had done everything: (1) to prevent the shipwreck from occurring; (2) once it had occurred, to reduce human and material losses (material losses which represent future human losses) to a minimum? Only the ‘absolute’ rule that, in case of shipwreck, the captain is the last to leave his ship, and indeed may die with her, can provide this guarantee. Without it, collective life would become impossible; for nobody would be prepared to accept responsibility or continue activity which involved putting their lives in the hands of others. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 223

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to Horkheimer’s ‘moral character is a luxury of economic security’ and to how structural rule-following (Adorno’s ‘socially prescribed consciousness’) functions; also feeds slavery-era/leadership ethics debates.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense ethical argument that an absolute rule provides the only guarantee that prior responsibilities were done — a paradigm-shifting defense of rule-absolutism over consequentialism that resists one-sentence summary.