Ethics and Values
Ethical concerns underpin the sector of sustainable tourism. Ethics is what allows us to make decisions about daily interactions with others and the world around us – it is fundamental to constructing the types of sustainable relationships that we have already discussed in Chapter 1. At its most basic level ethics distinguishes right from wrong. Its place in sustainable tourism is so important that an ethics-based platform has been suggested as an extension of the advocacy à cautionary à adaptancy à knowledge-based platforms that we reviewed in Chapter 1. Macbeth (2005) calls for a sixth platform in tourism studies, an ethics platform – he places this even after a fifth sustainability platform. An ethics platform provides us with the moral compass to make decisions about all our travel-related decisions, especially the hard ones that we don’t like to think about.