Can Tourism Be Ethical?

Thesis: Tourists and tourism are bad.The tourist, Santayana tells us, is the "most notorious" kind of traveler (Santayana 1964).If that was true in the last century, the tourist's notoriety has only increased alongside our awareness of carbon emissions, neo-colonial exploitation, and consumptive excess.That's why "'Tourism' is what we call travelling when other people are doing it" (Callard 2023) and "Nobody likes a tourist" (Xhignesse 2023).This is no mere academic handwringing.Residents of popular destinations are fighting back: destroying sunbeds on Canary Island beaches, squirting tourists in Barcelona with water pistols, running online "Stay Away" ads targeting would-be Amsterdam visitors, and chanting "Gringo, go home" at rallies in Mexico City (Bailey 2024; Stockwell 2024; Forsans 2025).Anti-tourism sentiment is strong, and founded in legitimate concerns.Antithesis: Tourism is deeply meaningful.At the bakery my partner worked at, the poorly paid employees pooled money to help their eldest colleague fulfill his lifelong dream of taking a trip to Italy.After decades of scrimping, saving, and 6-day workweeks, my blue-collar, immigrant father now spends his late 60s taking well-deserved vacations.He particularly enjoys classic tourist activities like visiting the Trevi Fountain in Rome, photographing glaciers from an Alaskan cruise, and waiting in line for the subpar Philly cheesesteaks at Pat's and Geno's.The Make-a-Wish foundation, a nonprofit which fulfills wishes for critically-ill children, reports that "over half of the wishes we grant are Disney," that is, trips to Disneyland and Disney World theme parks (Thompson 2023).The next most common wish category is other domestic travel.Tourism, in these cases, is a weighty thing, something people sacrifice for.That sacrifice suggests that it is a meaningful aspect of these people's lives.It may even be a significant part of their identities (Xhignesse 2023). Synthesis?When we complain about tourists, we're calling out inconsiderate, obnoxious, and destructive travelers of privilege.But we're also sneering at terminally-ill children's choice of what to do with the short time remaining to them.We're dismissing what for many working-class people is the culmination of a long-term dream, a payoff it took years of labor to realize.We aptly accuse the tourist of entitlement, privilege, and a lack of authentic engagement with true foreignness.But our judgments about tourists might involve some of the same sort of entitlement and inability to understand others, and often involve moralizing about the kind of travel accessible to working-class people (Butcher 2009).There's a moral puzzle here, even if it's not a moral dilemma or logical incoherence.Complaints about visitors from residents of tourism hotspots don't directly contradict the idea that tourism can provide significant meaning for many people.But they should make us at least suspicious of tourism as a meaningmaking activity.Are we finding real meaning in something if it displaces residents, wrecks ecosystems, and exploits cultures, or are we just dressing up a guilty pleasure in the illusion of meaning?Many of us experience this tension as a sort of attitudinal