Tourism, like any other dimension of human agency, is no stranger to ethical and axiological assessment. As the pivotal World Tourism Organization’s (WTO) (1999) Global Code of Ethics for Tourism (GCET) asserts, if ethically conducted, ‘tourism’ is capable of ‘contributing to economic development, international understanding, peace, prosperity and universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms’. By implication, if tourism is not ethically conducted, some of the above goods may be diminished. In essence, depending on who gives shape to it and how, tourism can be good; or it can be bad.
Who is to say what is good and bad, though? On what ground can this kind of judgement be passed? How can assertions like those contained in GCET, which was adopted in 2001 by the United Nations (UN), be assessed and, if challenged, defended? Questions of this variety have kept philosophers busy for centuries and a number of answers have been provided over the long history of the discipline – far too much for a sheer book chapter like the present one. Rather, in what follows, whilst keeping the ground-breaking GCET in the background, I endorse, outline and apply john McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology, which is in all probability the most articulate theory of value developed by any philosopher in the 21st century. By doing so, given that the reader of this book is more likely to be a scholar in tourism studies than an academic philosopher, I offer first a detailed yet succinct presentation of a significant development in contemporary philosophical thought. Secondly, I offer a set of criteria whereby the reader can think about, and discriminate between, good and bad tourism, grounding GCET and any analogous normative approach to tourism in as deep a source of value as philosophical thought can retrieve. Moreover, as the paragraphs below show, the criteria offered by life-value onto-axiology are pertinent to the science and politics of tourism in the Anthropocene, neoliberalism and the global age, theorizing the Earth and humanity, carbon-fuelled capitalism and the end of nature and society – all of these being central themes of the present volume. I conclude this chapter by reflecting upon our being homines viatores in light of the implications of life-value onto-axiology for human agency, tourism included.
