I’M ONLY MY BROTHER’S KEEPER AT SEA LEVEL

Wrong to let climber die, says Sir Edmund (Tom McKinlay, New Zealand Herald, May 24th, 2006)

The first man to the summit of Mt Everest cannot understand how New Zealand climber Mark Inglis and others on the mountain left British mountaineer David Sharp to die.

"All I can say is that in our expedition there was never any likelihood whatsoever if one member of the party was incapacitated that we would just leave him to die," Sir Edmund Hillary said yesterday.

The renowned adventurer was reacting to the decision by double-amputee Inglis, who was one of many who passed the dying Briton near the summit without trying to rescue him.

Sharp died on the mountain.[...]

The difficulties posed by operating at high altitude were not an excuse.

"You can try, can't you? This is the whole thing," Sir Edmund said.

"You are in a dangerous situation, there's no question about that.

"But at least you can try to rescue the life of a man who is obviously in a distressful condition."

Sir Edmund has previously criticised the intensely commercial environment that has developed around the world's highest peak and called for a moratorium to give the mountain a break.

"I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mt Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top.

"They don't give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress and it doesn't impress me at all that they leave someone lying under a rock to die," Sir Edmund said.

Obviously uncomfortable supporters of Inglis have been responding to Hillary’s Old Testament-like thunder with the familiar argument that one’s intellectual and moral faculties are strained under these conditions and thus no one who hasn’t experienced them is in any position to condemn. This is true, of course, but the problem is that it is also true of anyone in a desert or jungle or just about anywhere else, and also of anyone who is hungry, thirsty, in pain, in mourning, drunk, broke, depressed, falling in love, falling out of love, getting married, getting divorced, sick, suddenly rich, pregnant, lonely, a new parent, under stress at work, injured, in a war, jilted, in jail, receiving the special attention of the IRS or endless other “special” conditions. Moral relativists like to imagine a mythical noble man assessing his moral choices independent of contingency, but as he doesn’t exist and never did, they end up standing for a regression to a pagan perception of morality in which we are just bounced around helplessly by chance and circumstance and are therefore never accountable.