Is it better to have corruption while saving more lives or no corruption while more people die seems to be the scenario of this hypothetical.

The captain will know he traded lives for money as will all the survivors. This will either haunt them or they rationalize it making it more likely for them to do corrupt things in the future or a bit of both.

This has future impacts and in the long term seems worse than having more people die, because it could lead to more corrupt decisions that get rationalized.

So I think system 1 is better because of long term impacts