Few men have taken human experience into the complete unknown. Columbus sailed towards the edge of the Earth. No one knew if Chuck Yeager could break the sound barrier and survive. The only clue Edmund Hillary had about life at 29,000 feet was that those who had previously tasted it had never returned. “We didn’t know if it was humanly possible to reach the top of Mount Everest,” he reflected. “And even using oxygen, if we did get to the top, we weren’t sure whether we wouldn’t drop dead or something of that nature.”

The awe, the respect and the uncertainty with which Hillary and Tenzing climbed comes from a different era. This week’s tales from base camp paint a grisly picture of Everest’s higher slopes in which commercial pressures and personal ambition eclipse all else. Climbers are not just stepping over dead bodies. Fuelled by an at-all-costs self-assertion, they are stepping around those who still bear life. The ethics of Everest have thus provoked the fiercest dilemma of morals and mountaineers since Simon Yates saved himself by cutting the rope that held his stricken partner Joe Simpson 20 years ago, the remarkable story told in Touching the Void.

There is a practical case for callousness, and it deserves to be put: the rules in the “death zone” above 25,000 feet are complicated. It is not women-and-children-first territory because anyone above the South Col has deliberately and knowingly placed themselves in considerable danger. By stopping to share vital oxygen, a climber may be giving away the breath needed to save his own life. Everest is not the high seas, where rival sailors can be Good Samaritans only because their vessels are ready-made relief craft. Regrettably, rescue at high altitude is often against the odds. Unless a climber can walk, physically compromised rescuers — starved of oxygen, frozen by temperatures of minus 38C and exhausted by the slog to get that far — may be of little help.

Moral philosophy offers questions but not necessarily answers. Should one dive into perilous waters to save an imprudent swimmer? When does risking a second life to save a doomed one become senseless? Is an apparent moral wrong ever excusable?

And yet it is easy to over-elaborate the issue. Mark Inglis, the first double-amputee to reach the peak, has been singled out for criticism because, while pursuing his own goal, he left David Sharp, a stricken British climber, to his fate this week. In some respects, Mr Inglis was unlucky. A further 40 climbers also walked on by, but have remained unnamed. Our report today suggests that abandoning partners or ignoring other climbers has become as commonplace as the empty canisters that litter the moraine.

It would never have happened in Sir Edmund’s day, as he has made clear. He and Tenzing remembered to pack their humanity. It can be a heavy load. But what is the greater achievement: climbing a mountain or saving a life? Fulfilling an ultimately selfish dream or comforting a dying man through his final moments?