Everest Ethics

Because of the good weather last week, 42 people summitted including a Sherpa who beat his own world record of maximum Everest summits bringing it up to 16, a double-amputee who summitted -amazingly- on prosthetic limbs and a British diplomat who summitted 70 years after her grandfather's failed attempt. I had blogged about all three of those earlier. I had also mentioned that even though 42 people summitted last Thursday, one of them didn't make it. This was 34-year old David Sharp.

Things have taken an interesting turn recently, though. It seems that of the other 40-odd people who summitted that day, all were in a group, and (this is key) they all passed by a dying David Sharpe on their ascent. Sharpe, who had already ascended, summitted and was descending alpine style (that means solo), was lying there frozen to the point where he could only move his eyes (I couldn't find any information about the details of his death online).

The main defence put by Mark Inglis [that's the double-amputee] is not that the rescuers would have put themselves at risk but that David Sharp was "effectively dead". Frozen, he could only move his eyes. If this diagnosis is correct, it is extremely unlikely that he would have survived the descent. No amount of help would have saved his life.

At first, I was a little outraged. However, having done a wee bit of climbing myself (four trips to various parts of the Indian Himalayas, climbing up to ~16,000 feet) I think we should desist to climb on the high horse and begin moralizing. Bear with me for just a minute. The BBC's resident medical ethicist Daniel Sokol has written about this incident. He distinguished between what is justifiable and what is excusable. He says

An act is morally justified if you can show that it was the right thing to do. An act is excusable if, even though what you did was wrong, the circumstances were such that you cannot really be blamed.

So, I guess for all of us who watch Law and Order, an excusable act is one where the defendant pleads "Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity." Although what the defendant did was wrong, its excusable because (s)he's clinically insance (assuming (s)he really is insane, and all that).
So, given that the forty-odd climbers were in extremes of weather, at a high altitude with low oxygen, and most likely at their limits of endurance, this act is morally excusable, but not morally justified - so says Sokol.

I think that, to some extent, I agree with him. Assigning blame right now is pointless. Its not going to bring the dead climber back to life. And also, it can be brutal up there and to even begin to contemplate some kind of rescue procedure (ie, taking him down to base camp) might be outside the realm of one's physical abilities at that point. This is, of course, speculation based on my own experience - its very hard to pinpoint the exact conditions under which the decision to leave him behind was made. What do you think?

Here's the BBC article by Daniel Sokol.