Abstract
This article examines whether, and under which conditions, companies in ocean and air freight may ethically break contracts or raise prices during the current crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Its scientific basis is the PhD study The Impact of Alterocentric Business Ethics on the Financial Performance of European Firms, which defines alterocentrism as an ethical orientation that gives priority to the needs, perspectives, and well-being of others and operationalizes ethical business conduct through a 120-item questionnaire across six thematic fields.[1] Using that framework, this article argues that neither strict contractual absolutism nor unrestricted crisis pricing is ethically adequate. In crisis logistics, freight markets are indeed strongly driven by demand and supply, yet market pressure alone does not exhaust the ethical question. The legitimacy of contract deviation and price increases depends on proportionality, transparency, stakeholder inclusion, procedural accountability, and the availability of risk-sharing mechanisms for customers. Historically, COVID-19 and the Red Sea crisis demonstrated that supply chains can move from ordinary market adjustment into systemic disruption, where freight rates, fuel surcharges, and service commitments are destabilized by physical bottlenecks and security risks rather than by ordinary competition alone.[2] [3] [4] The present Hormuz crisis deepens this pattern through fuel scarcity, war-risk exposure, rerouting, and capacity loss in both maritime and air freight.[2] The final judgment of this article is therefore qualified but clear: yes, contracts may be broken and prices may be raised when doing so is appropriate; however, appropriateness must be justified in ethical, operational, and communicative terms.
1. Introduction
The Strait of Hormuz is not merely a regional shipping corridor. It is a systemic chokepoint for energy flows, maritime scheduling, air cargo economics, and the credibility of global supply contracts. When such a chokepoint enters crisis, the practical question for carriers, freight forwarders, shippers, and cargo owners is immediate: must contracts still be honoured exactly as written, or may parties suspend, reprice, delay, or even terminate them?
This question cannot be answered adequately by economics alone. In logistics practice, prices are often described as 100% demand-and-supply driven. That description is partly correct, especially for freight rates, bunker surcharges, aviation fuel surcharges, emergency risk premia, and short-validity spot quotes. Yet a purely market-based explanation does not resolve whether a price increase is fair, whether a contract deviation is justified, or whether a firm is merely exploiting fear and scarcity. The ethical issue is intensified by the fact that the binding force of contracts is context-dependent and culture-dependent. Commercial cultures differ in how strictly they prioritize literal performance, renegotiation, partnership continuity, face-saving, hardship accommodation, and burden-sharing.
For this reason, the present article adopts an alterocentric perspective. In the attached dissertation, alterocentrism is defined as a relational ethical orientation that prioritizes the needs and well-being of others over one’s own immediate interest.[1] Applied to supply chains, this does not eliminate profit, nor does it require loss-making heroism. Rather, it requires that decisions about repricing, rerouting, delay, and contractual deviation be assessed in light of their effects on customers, suppliers, employees, communities, and the continuity of the wider network.
2. Scientific Basis: The PhD Framework and Its Relevance to Crisis Logistics
The dissertation provides a suitable scientific basis because it does not treat business ethics as an abstract moral sentiment. Instead, it builds a measurable framework around six principles and 120 operational questions, thereby translating ethical expectations into managerial criteria.[1] For the current topic, that feature is decisive: whether contracts may be broken or prices may be increased is not a single yes-or-no issue, but a compound judgment involving leadership, stakeholder treatment, pricing, delivery, transparency, and communication.
| Thematic field from the 120-item framework | Relevance to the Hormuz crisis |
| 1. Alterocentric Business Strategy | Requires a public purpose, ethical core values, and an agreed view of how profit is used under crisis conditions. |
| 2. Holistic Stakeholder Engagement | Requires structured dialogue with customers, suppliers, employees, and communities affected by rerouting, delay, and scarcity. |
| 3. Predictable Decision-Making and Accountability | Requires a defined ethical decision framework, clear ownership, escalation routes, and documentation of deviations. |
| 4. Anchoring in Leadership | Requires visible ethical responsibility at leadership level rather than ad hoc reactions by sales or operations alone. |
| 5. Responsible Business Behavior | Covers sourcing, marketing, pricing, contracts, product/service delivery, and fair treatment in the operational core. |
| 6. Credible Transparency | Requires open communication, verifiable metrics, stakeholder feedback, and truthful content regarding disruption and repricing. |
The dissertation is especially relevant because it includes explicit questionnaire items on reasonable pricing, avoidance of arbitrary price changes, honouring agreements through contract duration, transparent pricing structures, ethical use of dynamic pricing, and on-time delivery and compensation when service fails.[1] In other words, the study provides not only a theory of ethics, but a directly applicable checklist for crisis freight management.
3. Historical Context: From COVID-19 to the Red Sea to Hormuz
The ethics of contract breach and repricing cannot be understood without historical context. During COVID-19, container rates on major routes rose to more than five times pre-pandemic levels, while congestion, blank sailings, empty-container imbalances, labour shortages, and inland bottlenecks destabilized service reliability.[3] Importantly, the COVID case showed that freight inflation was not simply a matter of greedy actors raising prices in a vacuum. It was often rooted in a genuine systems failure. At the same time, the crisis also revealed opportunistic behaviour, weak commitment to long-term relationships, and a deterioration of trust between carriers and cargo owners.[3]
The Red Sea crisis added a second lesson. Here, the principal driver was not pandemic congestion but security risk. Vessels avoided the Suez route and were diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, which prolonged transit times, increased ton-miles, raised fuel burn, and introduced new war-risk and insurance cost layers.[4] UNCTAD-related reporting indicated that rerouting pushed shipping ton-miles up by 6% in 2024, while Suez traffic fell to roughly 70% below 2023 average tonnage levels.[4] This matters ethically because it shows that increased prices can be a defensible response to real operational deterioration rather than an arbitrary exercise of market power.
The current Strait of Hormuz crisis is more severe still because it connects maritime insecurity directly to energy markets and therefore to both ocean and air freight. Freightos reports that the crisis has affected bunker fuel availability, triggered emergency fuel surcharges, and pushed transatlantic ocean prices from about USD 1,400/FEU to more than USD 2,100/FEU in one week, while some carriers announced further increases of USD 1,000-2,000/FEU.[2] On the air side, the same source reports that the Middle East supplies about one fifth of global jet fuel, that jet fuel prices more than doubled after the closure, and that flights in and out of the region were about 60% below pre-war levels, sharply tightening belly cargo capacity.[2]
Working historical lesson: crises do not abolish contracts, but they can transform the factual conditions under which contracts were made. In such moments, ethical judgment must distinguish between necessary adaptation and opportunistic extraction.
4. The Core Ethical Question: May Contracts Be Broken and Prices Raised?
A strictly deontological answer would say that contracts must be kept because a promise is a promise. That position has moral force. Stable contracts reduce uncertainty, enable planning, and protect weaker parties from arbitrary repricing. In global logistics, the expectation that agreed terms will be performed is part of the infrastructure of trust.
Yet the dissertation itself places ethics not only in fixed norms, but also in moral dilemmas, stakeholder relations, organizational context, and structured ethical decision-making.[1] This is crucial. If a carrier faces blocked sea lanes, unavailable bunker fuel, inaccessible airspace, war-risk exclusion by insurers, or a collapse of uplift capacity, literal performance may become unsafe, impossible, or economically disproportionate. In such conditions, insisting on unchanged performance at any cost may itself become unethical, because it externalizes intolerable burdens onto one party and can threaten the viability of the network as a whole.
Therefore, from an alterocentric point of view, contracts may be broken, suspended, or renegotiated when performance conditions have changed so materially that literal performance would amount to irrational or unjust burden concentration. Likewise, prices may be increased when the cost basis, risk basis, or capacity basis has genuinely changed. However, the mere existence of scarcity does not create an unlimited moral licence. The ethical permissibility of both measures depends on whether they are appropriate.
5. What Counts as “Appropriate”? An Alterocentric Standard
Appropriateness must be justified on multiple levels, not asserted unilaterally by the stronger market actor. Drawing on the six thematic fields of the dissertation, appropriateness can be assessed through the following criteria.
| Criterion of appropriateness | Ethical meaning in practice |
| Material causation | The disruption must be real: route closure, security threat, fuel shortage, insurance escalation, or capacity loss must actually affect performance. |
| Proportionality | Price increases and service deviations should reflect the changed burden, not a purely opportunistic revenue grab. |
| Transparency | Surcharges, revised rates, transit changes, and reduced validity periods must be explained clearly and promptly. |
| Consistency | Similar customers in similar circumstances should be treated comparably; arbitrary treatment undermines trust. |
| Stakeholder inclusion | Major customers and vulnerable suppliers should be informed early and involved in mitigation planning where possible. |
| Documented accountability | The decision should be owned, recorded, reviewable, and linked to a defined ethical escalation process. |
| Burden-sharing | The stronger party should not transfer 100% of the crisis burden downstream if alternatives exist. |
| Compensation or mitigation | Where service quality falls, credits, revised service levels, or alternative routings should be considered. |
This standard aligns closely with the questionnaire logic of the dissertation. The study explicitly emphasizes transparent and fair dynamic pricing, avoidance of arbitrary price changes, honouring agreements where possible, accountability for failed delivery, and compensation under defined standards.[1] Thus, the framework does not support a simplistic conclusion such as “contracts are sacred regardless of reality” or “markets decide everything.” It supports a more demanding conclusion: commercial adaptation is ethical only when it remains stakeholder-conscious.
6. Applying the Six Thematic Fields to Ocean and Air Freight in the Hormuz Crisis
6.1 Alterocentric Business Strategy
An ethical logistics actor should not wait until sales teams improvise ad hoc surcharges. It should have a pre-defined crisis strategy explaining what comes first: life and safety, continuity of supply, customer communication, risk allocation, and profitability thresholds. In the Hormuz context, this means a company should state whether it prioritizes route continuity, modal substitution, selective allocation, or temporary suspension. The ethical question is not whether profit disappears, but whether profit is pursued within a declared framework that recognises the interests of customers and the wider network.
6.2 Holistic Stakeholder Engagement
In a real crisis, the affected parties are not only shareholders. Importers face stock-outs, exporters face rollover risk, airlines face fuel shortages, ports face congestion, and end customers face inflation. Alterocentric stakeholder engagement therefore requires early customer briefings, structured exception handling, differentiated support for vulnerable customers, and realistic communication with suppliers and employees. A company that silently imposes new charges without engagement fails this criterion even if the surcharge is economically understandable.
6.3 Predictable Decision-Making and Accountability
The dissertation stresses the importance of ethical decision frameworks, ownership, and consequences for action.[1] Applied here, this means that contract suspension, force-majeure invocation, or emergency repricing should never be a purely sales-driven reflex. There should be a documented internal process that asks: What changed? What alternatives were tested? Is partial performance possible? Can demand be consolidated? Can the burden be shared? Which customers are critically dependent? Which evidence justifies the surcharge? Predictability matters because crisis markets already contain enough uncertainty.
6.4 Anchoring in Leadership
If leadership is absent, operational teams tend to choose either panic or opportunism. Ethical crisis management requires senior leaders to own the policy on repricing and contractual deviation. The dissertation’s leadership dimension implies that ethical conduct must be anchored in governance and not delegated entirely downward.[1] In practice, this means a board-level or executive-level review of major deviations, especially where long-term contract customers are affected.
6.5 Responsible Business Behavior
This field is the operational core of the problem. The dissertation’s questionnaire explicitly addresses ethical pricing, dynamic pricing, avoidance of hidden charges, reasonable fairness, contract honouring, and delivery quality.[1] In the Hormuz crisis, fuel surcharges such as bunker or jet-fuel-linked adjustments can be ethically legitimate if they correspond to demonstrable cost increases. The same applies to war-risk surcharges, re-routing fees, and shorter rate validity periods where the cost environment changes daily.
However, legitimacy ends where explanation ends. If a carrier uses the crisis merely as a rhetorical umbrella for indiscriminate margin expansion, the ethical basis collapses. Likewise, if a forwarder raises prices sharply but cannot explain the relation between cost change and price change, the measure may be economically possible but ethically weak.
6.6 Credible Transparency
Transparency is not public relations. It means making the basis of action intelligible. Customers should know whether a surcharge is linked to bunker procurement, insurance premiums, route extension, airspace restrictions, slot scarcity, or reduced flight frequency. In addition, firms should communicate what part of the service remains stable, what part is at risk, and what alternatives exist. In the present context, AI-supported communication and scenario monitoring may help, provided it is used to improve consistency, speed, and factual clarity rather than to obscure responsibility.[1]
7. Surcharges, Freight Rates, and the Ethics of Dynamic Pricing
The current crisis illustrates why the distinction between base rate and surcharge matters. A surcharge is often ethically more defensible than a silent increase of the all-in rate because it identifies the exceptional burden explicitly. Kerosene-related air cargo surcharges and bunker-related ocean surcharges can therefore function as instruments of transparency, not merely of revenue extraction.
At the same time, surcharges can also be abused. The ethical test is whether they are traceable, temporary where appropriate, and related to real cost drivers. Freightos data indicate emergency fuel surcharges of USD 500-1,000/FEU in ocean freight and major increases in air cargo rates due to jet-fuel scarcity and capacity withdrawal.[2] Such evidence supports the view that higher prices can be justified under genuine crisis conditions. But the same evidence also implies that rate validity becomes shorter and volatility rises. For this reason, customers should not be told that a quote remains stable when the supplier knows that it almost certainly will not.
A further distinction is necessary between spot markets and term contracts. Spot rates respond rapidly to scarcity and are structurally more volatile. Long-term contracts, by contrast, exist precisely to soften volatility and preserve planning security. Ethically, this means that long-term contractual customers deserve stronger protection, better notice, and more explicit justification before repricing or cancellation. Otherwise, the strategic value of contracts is hollowed out exactly when it is needed most.
8. Why Contractual Binding Force Is Context- and Culture-Dependent
The user’s premise that contractual binding force is context- and culture-dependent is ethically and practically correct. Commercial systems differ in the weight they place on literalism, relational adaptation, hierarchy, and negotiated fairness. Moreover, in many jurisdictions, force majeure and hardship do not operate automatically; they depend on clause design, proof of causation, notice obligations, and the governing legal environment.[5] That legal fact has an ethical counterpart: the morality of contract performance is shaped not only by text but by business culture, stakeholder expectations, and the institutional norm of renegotiation.
This does not imply relativism. It means that the ethical evaluation of a contract break must consider whether the parties entered a transactional relationship only, or a strategic partnership; whether the event was foreseeable; whether the burden was symmetric or asymmetric; and whether the proposing party sought renegotiation before abandonment. In some contexts, rigid insistence on text may be seen as integrity. In others, it may be seen as relational blindness.
9. Customer Risk Mitigation: Why the Burden Is Not One-Sided
The final assessment must also acknowledge that customers can hedge the risk. That point is economically and ethically important. Cargo owners are not passive victims without agency. They may diversify carriers and modes, split Incoterms exposure, build buffer stock, buy cargo and delay insurance, negotiate bunker or jet-fuel adjustment formulas in advance, pre-book capacity, design hardship clauses, and invest in dual sourcing or nearshoring. During periods of relative calm, they can choose whether to pay a premium for resilience or to optimize exclusively for price.
Yet the fact that customers can hedge risk does not absolve carriers or forwarders of ethical responsibility. Hedging mechanisms are unevenly available, often expensive, and more feasible for larger firms than for smaller ones. Alterocentric ethics therefore requires suppliers to recognise asymmetry and avoid treating counterparties as if all possessed the same bargaining power and risk management maturity.
10. Final Evaluation
The ethical answer to the guiding question is neither an unconditional prohibition nor an unconditional permission. Yes, contracts may be broken, suspended, or renegotiated, and yes, prices may be increased, when this is appropriate. But appropriateness is not self-certifying. It must be justified by real disruption, proportional cost change, transparent communication, documented decision-making, consistent stakeholder treatment, and a serious attempt at burden-sharing.
In the Strait of Hormuz crisis, the case for some contractual deviation and some price increase is strong because the disruption affects the physical, energetic, and security foundations of freight transport itself.[2] [4] [5] Ocean freight is affected through rerouting, bunker constraints, emergency surcharges, insurance, and equipment dislocation. Air freight is affected through jet-fuel scarcity, flight cancellations, reduced belly capacity, and route restrictions.[2] In such a setting, insisting that every original contract be performed exactly as written may be commercially unrealistic and ethically distortive.
However, the permissibility of deviation does not justify arbitrary repricing, hidden charges, blanket cancellation, or the exploitation of weaker customers. The more a company benefits from scarcity beyond what the crisis reasonably requires, the weaker its ethical position becomes. Conversely, the more clearly it explains its actions, differentiates among customers fairly, preserves partial performance where possible, and offers risk mitigation paths, the stronger its ethical legitimacy becomes.
11. Conclusion
The present crisis confirms a broader lesson from COVID-19 and the Red Sea disruption: in global logistics, ethics is not the opposite of commercial realism. Ethics is the discipline that determines how realism is practised. The dissertation’s alterocentric framework is especially useful because it moves the discussion beyond slogans and toward operational criteria.[1] Applied to the Strait of Hormuz, it shows that contracts and prices must be evaluated through six interlocking lenses: strategy, stakeholder inclusion, accountable decisions, leadership, responsible business behavior, and credible transparency.
The correct final position is therefore a qualified one. Contracts may be broken when maintaining them unchanged would be impossible, unsafe, or grossly disproportionate, and prices may be raised when the crisis genuinely changes the cost and risk basis of performance. But both actions require justification. In ethical terms, the question is not only whether a company can pass on costs or suspend performance. The question is whether it does so in a manner that remains intelligible, proportionate, and alterocentric.
References
[1]: Schemmel, B. (2026). The Impact of Alterocentric Business Ethics on the Financial Performance of European Firms – A Comprehensive Study.
[2]: https://www.freightos.com/freight-industry-updates/weekly-freight-updates/transatlantic-ocean-rates-spike-as-surcharges-take-effect-april-14-2026-update/ “Transatlantic ocean rates spike as surcharges take effect – April 14, 2026 Update | Freightos”
[3]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2694104X251332108 “Tackling Global Shipping Disruptions: Lessons Learnt from COVID-19”
[4]: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/economy/year-ender-seas-under-fire-how-conflicts-disrupted-maritime-navigation-trade-in-2025/3784931 “YEAR-ENDER – Seas under fire: How conflicts disrupted maritime navigation, trade in 2025”
[5]: https://www.bakermckenzie.com/en/insight/publications/2026/03/asia-pacific-middle-east-conflict-reshapes-global-disputes-landscape “Asia Pacific: Middle East Conflict Reshapes Global Disputes Landscape | Baker McKenzie”