Ethics and Sustainable Tourism - David Fennell - Slidecast

ETHICS: WE’RE STUCK WITH IT [IN TOURISM]… WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT! David Fennell Department of Tourism and Environment Brock University, Canada AAG and IGU joint session on: Rethinking Sustainable Tourism: Tourism Geographies and Ethics Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers San Francisco, California, 14 - 22 April 2007

Geography for Travelers Podcast

Host: Alan A. Lew: http:// alanalew.com

Show Notes: http:// TravelGeography.info

Sponsored by:

Tourism Geographies journal: http:// www.nau.edu/tg

AAG Recreation, Tourism and Sport Specialty Group: http://www.geog.nau.edu/rts/

IGU Tourism Commission: http:// www.geog.nau.edu/igust/

Other:

Slidecast: http:// www.slideshare.net/alew

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AGENDA

I A ‘look at ourselves’ in tourism

II The evolution of morality: reciprocal altruism (RA)

III Implications of RA for tourism

IV Links to sustainability

V Conclusions

General aim:

To show that ethics is a foundational part of who we are, whether we like it or not, and that ‘resistance is futile’…even in tourism(?)

I. LOOKING AT OURSELVES

A long standing tradition in tourism is the necessity of examining problems from an impacts perspective.

McKercher (1999) aptly suggests that…

Intellectual time warp; ineffective models at controlling impacts

Isn’t a focus on impacts a reactive way of looking at the world?

And isn’t it more appropriate to investigate why we are prone to creating impacts in the first place (e.g., self-interest, hedonism).

Self-interest is the prevailing norm in tourism?

We are out for ourselves . It is a question of what is best for me and if someone…else pays the cost, then too bad as long as I get the benefits… isn’t this Darwin’s survival of the fittest? (Wheeller, 1994: 648).

If, as we are led to believe, tourism is the world’s largest industry, then we should remember that it is a world driven by avarice, greed, self-interest. ‘A much wants more, what’s in it for me, now mentality’. These traits are in us…We need, therefore, to look first at ourselves and then at society in general when we address tourism (Wheeller, 2004: 471).

But do we really ‘look at ourselves’ in tourism?

Not really, despite recent calls…

‘ Tourism can not be explained unless we understand man, the human being’ (Przeclawski, 1996: 236).

To do so necessitates going deeper into the realm of human nature…who we are at the very core…in putting more substance behind what theorists are starting to talk about re tourism.

II. THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY: Reciprocal Altruism (Trivers, 1971)

Humans up until the last 5 seconds of a 24-hour evolutionary clock lived in small, stable, dependent communities.

Cooperation only through repeated interaction over time

We knew each other quite well and everybody understood the ‘rules’ (Ehrlich, 2000).

I scratch your back, you…

1. Reciprocity : Acts that increase the fitness of a recipient as well as the performer when the recipient returns the favour.

2. Altruism : Acts that reduce the fitness of the performing individual while increasing that of the recipient.

The theory of reciprocal altruism

Trivers recognised that selection favours…

Sensitivity to injustice = motivate human aggression.

Sensitivity to costs and benefits of altruistic acts.

Detection of cheaters.

Making cheaters pay by cutting them off from future acts of aid.

Guilt and reparative gestures.

Forming norms of reciprocal conduct... rules of exchange.

Performing altruistic acts to strangers in inducing friendship

RA is a sociobiological theory…the systematic study of the

biological basis of all social behaviour (Wilson, 2000).

Here’s the kicker…

RA said to be the basis of:

Barter (Wilson, 2000).

The prisoner’s dilemma & tragedy of the commons (Ridley,1998).

Ethics (Mayr, 1988)…hammered out over eons…

The demands of reciprocal altruism can explain why the social and moralistic emotions evolved. Sympathy and trust prompt people to extend the first favor. Gratitude and loyalty prompt them to repay favors. Guilt and shame deter them from failing to repay others. Anger and contempt prompt them to avoid or punish cheaters (Pinker, 2002: 243).

III. WHAT RA MEANS FOR TOURISM

If RA is a form of symbiosis based on mutual benefit over time, symbiosis should not take place in tourism.

No time to build cooperation

The need to increase one’s own fitness (well-being)

This can be seen at two scales…

1. The Interpersonal Scale

Service providers & tourists cheat each other to ↑ their own fitness in the absence of repeated interaction over time (e.g., necklace ).

So, it is irrational to cooperate if we want to advance our own personal well-being at the expense of others…

Given that we are unlikely to see these individuals again .

One-shot reciprocity

2. Intraregional Scale

The cumulative impact of cheating over time in a region.

Doxey (1975) argued that…

At any given destination, there exists reciprocating impacts between outsiders and residents, and that the extent to which these are regarded as irritations will be determined in the main by the mutual compatibility of each, with the assumption that even with compatible groups, sheer numbers may well prove itself a source of incompatibility, with color, culture, and nationality presently appearing as secondary (p. 197).

These ‘reciprocating impacts’ are examples where tourists & residents have cheated one another (euphoria-antagonism)...

… leading to cumulative changes in the collective relationships between tourists and local people.

Cumulative-collective reciprocity

Examples

All-inclusives: Little motivation to act altruistically towards tourists who are high in volume and short on stay.

Staff cheat tourists (e.g., cheaper rooms) because employees realise few direct benefits (no RA).

We’re OK selling packages to the most besieged places on the planet, never knowing our role in the destruction of these places.

No shared memory

How to move forward?

Game theory tells us that strategies with higher payoffs over successive generations will be selected and dominate in a population: cooperation is a predominant strategy .

The two key requisites for cooperation to thrive are:

Reciprocity, to make defection unproductive.

Importance of the next encounter between the same 2 people great enough to make defection unprofitable (Axelrod, 1984).

But, the two people do have to meet again in the future

Here’s the problem…

Can we achieve cooperation in tourism, where cheating is a profitable strategy, because of no ‘next encounter’ (and time ) ?

The easy answer is ‘no’; the more difficult answer is ‘possibly’.

How?

Pious Hope 1: Successional RA

Sustained goodwill between host and guest helps succeeding tourists who move into the same tourist space.

The repeated nature of altruistic interactions between tourist & host leads to trust & cooperation over time.

Possibility of an emerging symbiotic relationship in tourist space.

In search of a community of ethically oriented selves (Kierkegaard, 1843).

Pious Hope 2: Frank’s Theory of Commitment

Example: We choose to tip staff, and not cheat them, by allowing emotion to override rational self-interest.

We tip because the act provides us with the opportunity to be trustful & open. Emotions keep us on track in allowing us to be seen in a positive light by others…and ourselves (Frank, 1988).

Nice in theory, but what about practice?

Altruism/cooperation often the least attractive options for tourists bent on satisfying their own hedonistic desires (see Butcher, 2003).

Even so, cooperation in tourism is showing up increasingly on the radar screen…

Cooperative spirit of small tourism businesses in Sweden (Karlsson, 2005).

Cooperative alliances in ecotourism industry at Sennen Cove, West Cornwall (Ireland, personal communication)

Societal n etworks, norms and trust that facilitate cooperation for mutual benefit in Gambia ( Jones, 2005).

Strategic alliances, marketing, and regional development work.

I see more and more of this every year in the literature.

IV. LINKS TO SUSTAINABILITY

How can evolutionary biology help us understand

what we are up against re sustainability?

We face modern challenges with hard-wired instincts little changed since our days naked on the savannah.

Alcohol, drugs, tobacco, gambling, shopping, etc., stimulate the brain’s pleasure and reward centre, but we haven’t had time to develop adaptive fears of these things (e.g., French fries).

Because…

We live in two distinct worlds:

the smaller hunter-gatherer one of altruism and solidarity

the modern one of huge economic/political systems (Hayek,1944/1994)

Our brains better suited to the 1st; can’t grasp the magnitude of the 2nd.

we live in huge impersonal communities;

grapple with broad concepts like globalisation sustainability.

Re sustainability, resource devastation is not new …

‘ For thousands of years we’ve devastated native faunas & found it difficult to manage scarce resources in a sustainable way’ (Steadman, 1995: 1130).

Evidence of stampedes involving bison (Hester, 1967).

People in traditional societies express individual need rather than communal long-term planning (Low, 1996).

V. CONCLUSION

We are moral by nature, whether we like it or not.

If freedom and morality are indeed closely linked...it is perhaps a rather paradoxical fact that the first effect of freedom should be to put us under these new constraints [ethics]. Our freedom is exactly what gives us these headaches, what makes possible this moral thinking, this troublesome kind of search for priority among conflicting aims. By becoming aware of conflict – by ceasing to role passively from one impulse to another, like floods of lava through a volcano – we certainly do acquire a load of trouble. But we also become capable of larger enterprises, of standing back and deciding to make lesser projects give way to more important ones. That, it seems, may be why moralities are needed (Midgley, 1994).