Climbing, Tejada-Flores wrote, is fundamentally meaningless, so humans apply ethical rules to the endeavor to disguise that. The rules are “designed to conserve the climber’s feeling of personal (moral) accomplishment against the meaninglessness of a success that represents merely a technical victory.” Satisfaction in climbing is all about preserving the sense of having overcome a true challenge. The “game” of climbing is to choose which set of rules to use for the particular type of climb you wanted to do.
