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Under this heading Steve Day posted in May this year an article asking the question whether extreme sports are morally defensible, especially those that pose very high risks to an individual’s life or health. The post drew a number of interesting responses, for example drawing parallels to the defensibility of suicide or looking at how mass public thrill has morphed into fascination with xtreme adventure live TV. In my mind some issues certainly are:

• responsibility to those who are close to the adventurer and have to live with the consequences of his (and sometimes her) actions
• the adventurer’s reliance on others coming to his/her rescue (with the rescuers often having to endanger their own lives) and his/her expectation that the public will pay for possible emergency responses
• the general issue of who makes money out of extreme adventures and who pays for its various aspects
• what motivates the spectator’s desire to experience thrill and are there boundaries to what can be experienced
• the nature of dangerous adventure itself, e.g. its role in society (historically and current), gender aspects, the adventurer personality

There are most likely no straight forward answers. I personally tend to think though that people who undertake or participate in extreme high-risk adventures too often seem to be driven by their egos only and seem to care very little about any critical questions and especially not ethical ones. If someone though does give considerable time and energy to critical reflection, I would find it hard to understand how his/her ego still can win out.

The clip below shows stunt performer Dan Osman climbing without any gear a 122m steep rock wall in a few minutes (the clip shows 1:48 min of that effort). Osman apparently was later killed in 1998 while doing another stunt he was somewhat famous for, called “controlled free falling,” where he would deliberately fall hundreds of feet relying on the safety rope.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under culture, holistic ethics, remarkable skills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.