I know that most of my Game of Thrones related posts have been released in an order that at least somewhat corresponds to the chronological events of the show, but I felt like examining a crucial event from the latter half of season one: the arrest of Lord Ned Stark (some spoilers will follow!). In episode seven of season one Ned Stark attempts to arrest Queen Regent Cersei Lannister and her son Joffrey, who sits upon the Iron Throne. Some viewers might mistake his capture (and eventual execution) as being brought about by his unwillingness to do things he considered morally wrong or ambiguous, but his downfall came about not because of his deontological moral beliefs, but because of his unwillingness to be pragmatic in a way that is not amoral or immoral. Ethical behavior and pragmatism are not always incompatible things.
Let me summarize the events leading to his apprehension. Cersei, the wife of the king, has had a lasting adulterous and incestuous relationship with her brother that produced Joffrey. Being a child of incest, he has no legitimate claim to the throne by law. Once Lord Stark learns of this fact, he warns Cersei that he will tell her husband when he returns from a hunt, but she arranges for him to get drunk while away, and the king is fatally wounded by a boar as a result. When he dies, Joffrey assumes the throne, and when Ned tries to dethrone him without bloodshed, he himself is ultimately taken into custody under false accusations of treason when a politician named Littlefinger betrays him.
Now, with the recap out of the way, I want to point out how Ned's moral impulse to not storm in and kill Cersei and her son without a trial, consistent with his moral beliefs that oppose all murder (even that of foreign political rivals like the unborn baby of Daenerys), is not responsible for his death. Trying to minimize loss of life and injury to all parties involved is a morally good thing (at least by Christian standards). He did not, however, warn anyone else about the incestuous origin of Joffrey, nor did he carefully weigh the probability of his ally Littlefinger betraying him.
It was not Ned Stark's righteousness that got him arrested. It was his failure to be cunning in a morally legitimate manner. Indeed, even if being an ethical person was what led to his arrest, the obligation to do the right thing would not have disappeared. The ease with which someone can do the right thing has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not a certain action is or isn't wrong. Ease and difficulty only reveal someone's willingness to do the right thing, not what is or isn't morally good.
On at least some occasions, being pragmatic--planning and acting in a way that aims at producing a certain realistic end--does not stand opposed to being morally upright. Had Ned opted for murdering Joffrey and his mother without giving them a trial in order to secure a desired outcome, he would have morally erred, yet he did not have to be so irrationally trusting to uphold his ethical code, and he did not need to keep his awareness of the incest a secret until he had no liberty to share it with others because of his arrest. He could have waited until the king returned from his hunt and told him of his wife's incest without warning Cersei in advance. He could have arrested Cersei and Joffrey directly after the king's death. His attempted arrest didn't have to end in knowledge of the truth dying with him, as he could have sent out ravens with messages to other cities to tell them of the incest and illegitimate lineage of Joffrey. In short, it is not as if being pragmatic excluded taking a course of action that avoided murder or extralegal activity.
Ned certainly needed to communicate his findings about the Lannister family to others if he wished for the truth to be made known, and he certainly needed the support of someone far less self-serving than Littlefinger if he wanted to arrest Joffrey and Cersei. A pragmatism that contradicts rightly living out morality is an abomination, but being pragmatic does not itself necessarily mean one must live unethically. In Ned's case, acting in a pragmatic manner and doing the right thing could both be pursued simultaneously, but he simply failed to acknowledge this and act upon it. Ned's rejection of the pragmatic is not all due to him being a moral deontologist. Some of it had to do with him simply not being a thoughtful political strategist.
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