Ethics, morality and rockclimbing

Abstract

It seems one can’t open a climbing magazine these days without encountering a barrage of duty statements such as “It is wrong to retro-bolt” or “It is wrong to bolt a new route too close to a naturally protected route”. Such statements are often referred to as examples of ethical debate, however, as we shall see, they are more properly referred to as moral debate. The distinction is not just a pedantic piece of linguistics either, it is, I believe, essential to understanding the true nature of these disputes, and it is the nature of these disputes which I am concerned with in this article. The distinction between ethics and morality was first brought to my attention in an article by Dr Green called ‘The Ethics of Climbing’ in Screamer 9 (1981). In this article Dr Green explains how ‘ethics’ derives from the Greek ‘ethikos’ which pertains to the spirit of the thing in question, so the ethics of climbing are concerned with the spirit of climbing. ‘Morality’, on the other hand, is is derived from the Latin ‘moralis’ pertaining to right conduct, so a morality is a set of commands, usually used to encapsulate a particular ethic. Dr Green goes on to suggest that just as many Christians’ obsession with the ten commandments is symptomatic of a failure by those individuals to grasp the spirit or ethos of Christianity, so too modern rockclimbers’ obsession with the morals of climbing signifies a shift in the ethos of climbing. I wish to examine this claim a little more closely. I believe that the legitimate role of morals is in the teaching of ethics. For example, it would be difficult to teach a child the abstract ethos of “caring for your fellow human being’s welfare” without first giving some concrete examples in the form of commands such as “Don’t hit other children at school”. It is by learning these moral commands..

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Mark Colyvan
University of Sydney

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