Growing on the go? Moral development and tourism

Abstract

Should researchers in tourism and leisure studies care about the growth and developmentof human beings as moral agents? Einstein famously remarked ‘It has becomeappallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity’. Surely, we facemany problems – war, for instance, or extreme poverty – for which our failure to findsolutions is less a matter of shortcomings in technological know-how and more a matterof insufficiencies in moral understanding or will. Humankind is ‘the moral animal’(Wright 1994), but as a species, we have given little attention in recent centuries tounderstanding or developing our moral capacity – tied to what Habermas (1987) callsour communicative and emancipatory needs – in comparison with the energy we haveexpended toward meeting our instrumental needs, through knowledge development inpursuit of security, longevity, material wealth creation and consumption-based pleasure.We have eradicated smallpox in a global population that numbered over four billion, wehave warmed the planet more than a degree in a paltry 100 years, and we have eveninvented a real-life version of a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak (Holly 2014). Thesesorts of grandiose, if sometimes dubious, feats are the result of our immense investmentin developing scientific understandings of our material world. Comparatively, we havedeveloped little communicative and emancipatory capacity to do things which, at facevalue, would arguably seem less challenging – say, ending human deaths from starvation(Singer 2009), intervening effectively in geopolitical conflicts before they result in full-scale genocides (Downing and Husband 2005), or simply not shrinking in awkwardnesswhen needing to interact with a terminally ill colleague (Stone and Sharpley 2008).Fromthestart,leisurestudieshasbeenbroadlyconcernedwithhumandevelopmentandflourishing. It has also been attuned to leisure’s social value – or the way that individualflourishing can help to advance the greater good – as highlighted in the traditional sociallypositive connotation of recreation. In contrast, a thirst for instrumental need (or desire)fulfilment has tended historically to drive knowledge production in tourism studies, whichhas largely been discursively constructed through a lens of neoliberal marketization as an‘industry’ (Tribe 2008; Higgins-Desbiolles 2006), aimed to produce return-on-investmentfor capital, pleasure for tourists and ‘development’ for communities (where developmentgenerally seems to refer to an increase in material standard of living). But tourism is also aspace of rich human encounter – a practice through which different individuals withdifferent biographies from different cultures and life-spaces viscerally collide. Organiza-tions ofnolessmagnitudethantheUnited Nations have recognizedtravel’scapacity inthisregard (Higgins-Desbiolles 2006). More than one billion of us are now on the move