Would You Rather: Climb a 100-story building with no harness or Walk a tightrope across a canyon?
Would you rather Climb a 100-story building with no harness or Walk a tightrope across a canyon? "Climb a 100-story building with no harness" or "Walk a tightrope across a canyon" — neither option is desirable, so the real question is which is less terrible. Consider what it would actually mean to choose "Climb a 100-story building with no harness". You would wake up each morning in a world where this was your reality. The practical implications alone would reshape your routines, your relationships, and the way you think about yourself. For someone in the extreme domain, this choice carries specific weight — it is not abstract. It would change how you move through the world in ways that are hard to predict from the outside. "Walk a tightrope across a canyon" deserves the same scrutiny. At first, it might seem like the safer or more reasonable option. But safety has its own costs. Choosing this path means closing the door on what "Climb a 100-story building with no harness" offered, and over time, that closed door can become the thing you think about most. In extreme dilemmas specifically, the option that seems less dramatic often turns out to be more life-altering in practice. There is no framework that resolves this cleanly. Utilitarian reasoning breaks down because the outcomes are incommensurable. Deontological reasoning struggles because neither option is clearly wrong. Virtue ethics asks what kind of person each choice would.