Climbing high and letting die

Abstract

ABSTRACT On May 15th, 2006, 34 year-old mountaineer David Sharp died in a small cave a few hundred meters below the peak of Mount Everest in the aptly named ‘death zone’. As he lay dying, Sharp was passed by forty-plus climbers on their way to the summit, none of whom made an effort to rescue him. The climbers’ failure to rescue Sharp sparked intense debate in mountaineering circles and the mainstream media, but philosophers have not yet weighed in on the issues. This is surprising, since Sharp’s case raises interesting puzzles about the duty to rescue. Commonsense morality suggests that it was wrong for the climbers to put their summit bids ahead of saving a human life. But rescuing Sharp was extremely risky. If you and I are not required to assume significant risks to rescue others, why think the climbers had a moral duty to do this? My primary focus is on a new principle of rescue, which I dub the comparable risk principle, that has not been discussed in the duty-to-rescue literature. More generally, I explore the limits of the duty to rescue not just in Sharp’s case, but in relevantly similar high-risk environments common in action sports.