> There are a lot of watermen in the Navy, I'm sorry people think we just don't care.
I think that the notion is that "The Navy", as an institution, does not care, to which I would offer, "The Navy" as an institution has no capacity to care or not care, only individuals and groups of them within it do.
I think it's reasonable to comment on whether institutions "care" or not about negative externalities by looking at the policies they have in place to mitigate them.
Why don't you think institutions can be modeled as an aggregation of the participants? I have no problem seeing the behavior of ants as collectively purposeful even though individual ants make poor conversation partners. You might as well say that individual humans have no capacity to feel, only individual cells within the body are capable of reacting to stimuli.
I'm not being a contrarian here; while I don't want to write a wall of text to convince you I absolutely believe in the notion of collective consciousness ass an emergent complex phenomenon that is amenable to quantitative analysis under certain circumstances (eg institutional persistence vs. ad-hoc flocking behavior in crowds).
I think that the notion is that "The Navy", as an institution, does not care, to which I would offer, "The Navy" as an institution has no capacity to care or not care, only individuals and groups of them within it do.