# Ethics to Intersect Civic Participation and Formal Guidance
## 4 Discussion: Contextualising the Examples
### The Operational Role of Ethics
The SSF Guidelines distil from experiences how to govern a complex-adaptive SES through an approach that is grounded in an actor-centric ethic. Geoethics makes an actor-centric ethic its very core concept. This shared focus entangles both approaches. The human-rights-based approach of the SSF Guidelines has no equivalent in the definition of Geoethics, although human rights were addressed in developing geoethical thinking [102]. Nevertheless, the explicit reference to human rights can be strengthened when applying geoethics to the marine environment based on its actor-centric design. Considering collective human rights, the 1954 \"Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict\" (The Hague, 14 May 1954, 3511 U.N.T.S. 216) is the first international treaty that mentions the principle of a \"common heritage of mankind\". Later the Antarctic Treaty and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) applied this concept. When proposed in 1967 to be applied to the high seas, the industrialised countries rejected the principle of a \"common heritage of mankind\" in favour of \"the freedoms of the high seas\", as outlined in the 1958 Geneva Convention on the High Seas [103]. This initial tension between different concepts, although settled mainly in \"The 1994 Agreement\", still reigns supreme. It is maintained and powered by the increasing technical capability to operate in the high seas in a commercially viable manner [54]. Applied to the high seas, the \"common heritage of mankind\" principle consists of four elements. It prohibits states from proclaiming sovereignty over any part of the deep sea(bed) and requires that states use it only for peaceful purposes, sharing its management and the benefits of its exploitation. To recapitulate, individual, collective and institutional agents effectively face choices on how to justify operations at the high seas. They may turn to international law, natural law or folk-ethical considerations, such as the golden rule \"not doing to others what you would not have them do to you\" [104]. In practice, the associated dilemma may increase depending on the awareness of the consequences of actions [105] and individual consciousness regarding altruistic (or egoistic) standards. [PERSON]'s model [106] helps to structure the dilemma and emphasises the function of a human-rights-based approach in governance. [PERSON], inspired by [PERSON] [107], conceived a three-category hierarchy of moral development as a basis for ethical behaviour (Table 3). [PERSON]'s concept holds that moral reasoning has six identifiable developmental levels around a central category for which societal conventions tune behaviour. At the pre-conventional levels, the primary social driver is the silent acceptance of the rules imposed by the dominant powers. At the lower conventional level, the primary social drivers are conformity with the governing status quo, maintaining some relationships convenient to both, the ones holding power and those conforming to this power. At the upper conventional level, people act mostly in compliance with law and order. At the lower post-conventional level, a social contract establishes rules and shapes a position. At the upper post-conventional level, the agent acts aligned with ethical principles and not to avoid punishment or to comply with conventions. Although [PERSON] is fixing an ideal-typical scheme to a process [108], the scheme is useful because of the convergence across cultural groups of shared moral values, the development of crucial moral judgement stages and the adoption of related social perspectives [109]. Before UNCLOS, governance rules on high seas fitted broadly to pre-conventional levels and the lower conventional level [110]. However, the principle of \"the freedoms of the high seas\" (for all seafaring people) was progress compared to a time when operations at the high-sea often were at a lower pre-conventional level.