ABSTRACT
Thinking critically about the ethics of tourism involves more than just passing judgements on the actions of individual travellers or producing codes of conduct. Such approaches fail to address more fundamental issues concerning the relationships between ethics as such and tourism – understood in its specifically modern (i.e. historically, socially and economically particular) forms. Ethics as such can be considered a mode of relating to the world and things in it (a possibility all ethical beings have) such that we concern ourselves with sustaining those things for who/what they are, rather than for their use to us. (In Kantian terms this is to treat them as ‘ends in themselves’ rather than as ‘means’ to our ends (Smith and Duffy 2001).) Fundamentally speaking, being ethical is not a matter of following moral norms or rules of conduct at all (however ‘modern’, ‘enlightened’ or ‘universal’ they may claim to be) but of expressing an ability to respond to others in ways that seek to sustain a kind of ‘open community’ with them. 1 This, we should note, would be true whether that open community is understood solely in human terms or as a wider ecological community.
