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The Parable of the Sadhu

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The Parable of the Sadhu walks us through an ethical dilemma that Bowen McCoy had faced on his journey through Nepal. McCoy and his anthropologist friend Stephen had been at the halfway point of their 60 day travel through the Himalayan mountains. While on this journey there were 3 other groups of travelers that had joined, the New Zealanders, the Swiss, and the Japanese. During their travels the mountaineers encountered an Indian holy man, a Sadhu, who was near death, half naked, barefoot, and suffering from exhaustion and hypothermia. They had found the man at 15,500 ft. while attempting to reach their summit point at 18,000 ft. Here is where the ethical dilemma rears its head. The travelers were now faced with heavy questions: do they help the Sadhu ultimately diverging them from their goal to reach the summit, or do they keep hiking on and leave the Sadhu to possibly die? Another ethical dilemma is seen at the end of the parable when McCoy begins to question if he should have done more?
(The Parable of the Sadhu, 1997)
The ethical frameworks that can be seen at the core of Stephen’s and McCoy’s conflicting responses to the problem of the Sadhu are that Stephen took a deontological approach while McCoy seems to have taken the a utilitarian approach. Stephen was quicker in thinking and making his decisions based on his ethical framework. By taking the deontological approach, Stephen was focused on duty. The deontological approach allows a person to act based on how they would want to be treated. The golden rule comes into play; “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Trevino & Nelson, 2014, p. 43). A deontological approach argues that people are humans with rights and dignity. Emmanuel Kant, an 18th century philosopher, said that each of us has a worth or dignity that must be respected. This dignity

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