Jim Hopkins: Taking moral high ground easy from comfort of home

We speak so easily of the moral high ground. It is a domain we know well. And being the assiduous miners of virtue we are, we've long staked a claim to this elevated zone. It's ours as of righteousness, let's say.

In matters of character, we like to regard ourselves - privately, of course, our admirable modesty precludes any public swaggering - as a superior species. Less racist than the Aussies, more peaceful than the Yanks, more resourceful than the Poms and more caring than just about anybody.

Poor we may be - and getting poorer - but in the bank of virtue we are proud millionaires. No longer "the Prussians of the South Pacific", we have become - at least in the privacy of our own imaginings - morality's master race, a shining example to a sordid planet of what its lesser breeds might be if only they were more like us.

As citizens of a nation that has "led the world" in so many good and proper ways, a nation that wears its Nuclear Free status boldly on its breast like a medal of honour, eternally hopeful the radiant gleam will shame the unenlightened, we consider the moral high ground as our turf.

But this week we've been challenged to explore less reassuring territory.

We've been asked to go beyond the moral high ground to an amoral place where survival is so uncertain and danger so great that self-interest must in every circumstance prevail.

This is a territory almost beyond comprehension and apparently beyond compassion.

And while our exploration has been by proxy, for this is a zone visited only by the most compulsive, resourceful and brave, it has been more disconcerting than we would wish.

A triumph has been tarnished and an act of affirmation demeaned by the suggestion that one of us - a rare and exceptional one - has breached the code that binds all of us. An achievement which initially reaffirmed all those qualities we prize - grit, guts, ingenuity, pluck - is now sullied for some by accusations that a man with no legs is, worse still, a man with no heart.

Many New Zealanders have not enjoyed the realisation that one of Sir Edmund Hillary's successors passed by a dying man on his way to the top.

Not without inquiry, let's be clear, and not alone either, for 39 others took the same steps.

But they weren't from here - not most of them, anyway. They weren't guardians of the moral high ground. They didn't compromise us.

Or "possibly" compromise us. For the debate has been fierce. Some say, unequivocally, that David Sharp was a dead man breathing. They say he was beyond salvation and any attempt to save him would have only endangered others.

They point to the 40 who did not stop to aid, comfort or attempt a rescue as if, in some way, this apportions responsibility equally and so diminishes each individual's "duty of care". But it doesn't. It simply means the same elemental choice was made 40 times by 40 different people. The fact that they all made the same choice may vindicate each of them. Or it may prove that Good Samaritans are as hard to find on mountains as they are by the side of a dusty road.

That is clearly Sir Ed's view. Our greatest hero is unflinching and emphatic: "In our expedition there was never any likelihood whatsover if one member of the party was incapacitated that we would just leave him to die."

So two heroes disagree. And although both have been criticised, we should acknowledge that each has earned the right to their opinion. They have been to the top of the world, climbed the last rock before the void of space.

They have gone where no one goes except by choice and, in that unimaginably brutal place, each has made their own choices.

The rest of us have never pushed ourselves that far. Our certainties are compromised by our comfort. Whatever moral conclusion we reach, we are obliged to accept that it is much easier to come to it in a warm room at sea level than in the thin and freezing air of Everest.

As we've endeavoured to answer this week's oft-repeated question; "How would we feel if it was a Kiwi in the cave?" many New Zealanders have discovered that the moral high ground is a more ambiguous and uncomfortable place than we would wish it to be.

But only one of us will have to face another, much harder question. Only one of us knows it will be his own answer that may, ultimately, prove the measure of his achievement - as a mountaineer and as a man. Only Mark Inglis will be asked, over and over again, not "Why did you go?" but rather, "Why didn't you stop?"