(fluently, in control) through the medium in which you are climbing gives rise to a deeply gratifying experience of effective agency. Furthermore, it can involve expressing, through the activity of climbing, something about who you really are and what is deeply important to you; indeed, many mountaineers talk about how climbing is something they need to do in order to be who they really are. This, plausibly, is why they get a deep sense of exhilaration and fulfilment from mountaineering.36

Two further points about the value of these experiential goods. First, we want to say, in the context of risk it is not just the experience (of exhilaration, say) that is valuable but the experience that is produced by actually taking and overcoming risks. Second, these valuable experiences can in turn be constituents of more general abstract goods, like wellbeing and fulfilment: a person may be more fulfilled in virtue of the experiences yielded by competently engaging risk.

So far we have shown that competently overcoming risk in mountaineering is related to a variety of values involved in mountaineering: engaging in adventurous activities, overcoming challenges, expressing one’s agency, exhilaration, fulfilment, and so on. These are general goods that almost everyone agrees have value. All this is compatible with [Despite], however. But there are two additional and crucial claims that distinguish our view from [Despite]: First, risk is a constitutive and ineliminable element of mountaineering and the character of the experiences it brings (we argued for this earlier). This implies that, if the risk were completely absent, the activity engaged in wouldn’t really be a form of mountaineering and the experiences produced would not be experiences of mountaineering. So, since the value of mountaineering depends in part on the character of the experiences it brings, the value of mountaineering depends (in part) on the risks it involves. We thus arrive at our second crucial claim: mountaineering and the goods it brings have the particular type of value they do (in part) because of the risks they involve. This is distinct from [Despite], since risk is not a mere (causal) means to the various mountaineering goods we’ve identified. Rather, risk is a constitutive and ineliminable part of the goods themselves: the character and content of these values, as realised through mountaineering, is essentially shaped by the mountaineering risks they involve. It is in this sense that mountaineering has the value it does (in part) because of the risk it involves.37

To summarise our argument so far, then: Risk is valuable (in part) because of the goods it realizes – goods that need not be specific to mountaineering, but that are widely recognised as good by non-mountaineers too. But these goods, when realized in the context of mountaineering, have the particular value they do only because they involve competently engaging mountaineering risks. Thus, risk is one of the things that gives mountaineering its value, whereby mountaineering has the value it does in part because of the risks it involves.

36 Capturing a number of these ideas, in the 1984 film of his ski descent of the East Face of Aiguille Blanche du Peuterey, Stefano de Benedetti says, ‘This is my mode of expressing myself. This is my mode of speaking to the others of freedom’. And in the movie Steep he says: ‘In the perfect moment, I was so concentrated, there was no space for other thoughts. […] When you are in a situation where if you fall you die, everything changes. […] You act like a different person. You act with all yourself. You are making a completely different experience, and in some way you are discovering yourself. This is the magic of the mountain. […] But to live so close to the possibility of dying, you understand what is really important and what [is] not. […] It’s probably the highest moment of my life. Because in the perfect moment, I was, or I felt to be, a little superman’.

37 To put it in more technical jargon, risk is ‘constitutively valuable’: a constitutive feature, not just of mountaineering, but of the values mountaineering expresses and the valuable experiences it brings. It may be useful to here distinguish our view from some other axiological theses. In particular, we are not saying (1) that risk-taking is unconditionally valuable or good in all circumstances (though we remain non-committal as to whether competent risk-engagement is); (2) that competent risk-engagement is intrinsically valuable (if that implies non-relationally valuable); or (3) that risk is merely instrumentally valuable (only a means to other goods). There are several other ways risk could be valuable – finally valuable (as an end there is reason to pursue for its own sake), symbolically valuable (symbolic of something else of value), and more – but even if risk is valuable in such respects, these do not get to the nub of its value.