I feel that punishing sobriety and rewarding drunkenness is probably not a good idea, if we want to avoid our ships hitting icebergs.
The junior watch officer should have summoned the master long before the ship hit an iceberg, if they are inattentive (e.g. they fall asleep in the warm dark of a bridge at night) the BNWAS will alarm to try to wake them, then eventually summon senior officers (typically the master, but maybe also a chief engineer and others) to the bridge. The master is responsible for ensuring the BNWAS is operable.
It would be extremely unusual for a commercial vessel (not to mention military vessel) to allow officers to drink booze, especially enough booze to fall "asleep in a drunken stupor". Of course just because something is prohibited doesn't mean it won't happen, but now we're talking about culpability and of course you're culpable if as a foreseeable consequence of your prohibited actions bad things happen, that's negligence at best.
If it really is your philosophy then who is to blame?
Of course no good captain would leave the ship in control of a new second in command in hard conditions. However sometimes the second in command would be captain years ago if there was need for a captain but there isn't, and then there is flexibility.
No. But also, this is not the situation.
Did the CEO create the culture in which they could not despite being able to?
He should bear responsibility for the door plugs, though.
It's not about the result or what the CEO "believes", it's about what they reasonably did to avoid bad outcomes. Did the CEO do anything to be certain his people are competent, or that an incompetent person cannot tank the quality of the product? Did they take any reasonable measures, implemented checks, ordered audits, spent more to prioritized safety and quality?
The CEO has the highest executive authority and the highest pay. This means the highest level of accountability. Until the shit hits the fan, or the ground, and then the employees were incompetent, the processes were weak, the consultants that weren't picked by the CEO said it's all good.
The reason they get away with this isn't that the law protects them, it's that they fill pockets and buy laws to protect them. Random "Empty Pockets" Joe won't get a pass for building something that kills people because they didn't bother to verify anything.
Plenty of people have to respect a much higher standard of accountability: did the CEO take actions to ensure that proper adherence to industry standard was respected? Which processes were put in place to ascertain the continued respect of these standards?
In many jobs, incompetence will get you in jail. Sure, sometimes your reports go out of their way to conceal issues, but aside from extreme cases, a CEO should have to show what they did to prevent issues, and merely "believing" should land them in jail.