I think you're assuming some implied criticism on my end of thing and that's not why I brought up definitions, actually my reply was basically my answer. From my perspective that's more of a question about a persons ethical code then one in which people can really give a consistent personal answer. It's kinda like that "Your house is on fire, and you can only save one thing" question, lots of people answer it by trying to figure out what the asker would think the best answer is, quite a lot of the remainder will try to come up with something witty or clever, like "The Fire", or pragmatic and say "My phone, so I can call the Fire Dept." That can be informative too but if your goal was to find out what inanimate and portable sentimental object people place the most value, you generally need to specify that if you want more than a small minority of people to answer that.



That's not surprising, usually if someone doesn't like a specific item with a well known flavor they won't come away thinking "Yuck, I hate chocolate" they'll think "Yuck, I hate this specific thing, this specific chocolate is bad". I'm a little surprised the strawberry shake wasn't right up there with them, typically one of those protein shakes is about the only thing that's definitely reasonably okay inside a random MRE, assuming your prof was conducting on MRE's. Somehow I'm betting the peaches, the beef stew, and the ravioli were high on the list and the Country Captain Chicken was right down near the bottom.



Like I said, I'm not knocking the question, I was actually answering it, I consider the term too fluid to context and audience to give a meaningful answer, and I don't happen to have a personal, specific definition for the term so without a specific parameter for you, the answer really is "In what sense do you mean that?", since you say you don't really have a specific concept in mind, the question kinda of resolves to me as "X + Y = 10, what is X?", with that data I can pretty much only answer X in terms of Y, which is why I mentioned Altruism as a possible Y. I'm not disparaging the question, or any of the answers given, just that for me the question kinda amounts to "Which do prefer, a mirror, a dog, or a hammer?" none are independently huge on my list and generally any circumstance in which I'd need to pick one would be a no brainer. If ambition is simply here as a context of 'more rank, power, and money in your job' then I'd assume that to be a no brainer "Yes", same as "Would like $1000?" until the expected "at the expense or risk of..." comes in to which the answer would be too personal and case specific to mean anything.