Well, "how the species rolls" has everything to do with ethics, understood in the broad sense of the study of what we should be doing and why.

I'm not sure why you think the notion of judgments clouds things. You will not act on X unless you have arrived at the judgment that it is good / instrumental to act on X.

What does Clifford mean by "wrong"? It means unfair, as the ship's owner is being, in order to pursue his own profit.