ABSTRACT
The moral turn in tourism studies strives to make the ethical implications of travel more personal for researchers and tourists alike (MacCannell, 2011, 2012; Caton, 2012, 2015; Freudendal-Pedersen, 2014; Mostafanezhad & Hannam, 2014). In a time of increasingly mobile, yet globally connected societies, an ethical lens works to bridge studies of the politics of mobility (Cresswell, 2010) with research concerned with social and personal responsibility (see Caton, 2012, 2015; Freudendal-Pedersen, 2013; Mostafanezhad & Hannam, 2014; Grimwood, Yudina, Muldoon, & Qui, 2015). Studies of ethics are about the responsibility we take, or do not take, in our everyday lives and therefore how responsibility extends to our travel choices (Fennell, 2000; MacCannell, 2011; Caton, 2012; Freudendal-Pedersen, 2014). However, critical investigations of ethics have only more recently garnered attention in tourism studies, which Caton (2012) remarks is particularly pertinent given that tourism studies operate on loaded moral territory, speaking to both light-hearted pleasure and heavy social consequences (see also MacCannell, 2011; Mostafanezhad & Hannam, 2014).
