The decision to help save others isn’t necessarily a selfish one either. There are selfish justifications to help strangers in an emergency. All strangers are potentially valuable to you, due to the nature of humans and what they’re capable of. Whether the action was selfish or selfless depends on how much risk you put yourself in, and how important the people were to you that you were saving.

Given the Titantic’s location – far out in the Atlantic in icy water – men would have recognized the futility of jumping overboard.

The Lusitania, on the other hand, went down in May only 8 miles from Ireland. Under these conditions, I would take my chances in the water and put some distance between myself and ship before it went down in the hope of swimming to land or getting pulled out of the water by the locals. Swimming for shore is a strategy that would certainly favor strong young men.

…the time difference just shifted the budget constraint so that high total utility could be achieved by saving as many as could arrive on time (selecting for athleticism) versus saving those that are preferred (which requires time-costly sorting).

How about a third choice, conscience-driven self-preservation?

For instance, if I’m a single mother who’s raising three children by herself (and I’m on the ship while my kids are at home), I might save myself, not because of adrenalin-driven self-preservation, but because of conscience-driven self- (and family-) preservation.